Buta, Pattey and Allah Chowrangi

In a lonely December night four men died in the city of Karachi. One died on a road side island, because he had been unable to find his daily dose of charas and the something extra he had taken to a few years ago. His name was Buta. He left behind three daughters, two sons, one wife and two old parents. His family had long given up on Buta. There had been a time when Buta ran his own business. He was a fruit-seller and had his own mobile cart. He sold fruit worth Rs 300/- to Rs 500/- almost every day. He paid Rs 2000/- per month to the local police, who let him keep the cart on the roadside. He was good at haggling over a few rupees and slipping a few bad mangoes when begum or sahab weren’t looking, Summer was the best season, because mangoes were a national fruit. When sales were very good, he would take home a few to his children, wife and parents.

Buta had a persistent cough, which would distract customers, especially ladies who would quickly put their dupattas across their nose and mouth and walk off to his neighbor. It was his neighbor who suggested the charas. He told him the ‘ciggrett’ is only for five rupees and will save him several trips to the Doctor who isn’t even the Big Doctor , but still charges Rs 100/-. Buta started with one now and then which became a daily routine. He felt ever sorrier for himself and his state. He felt an abiding hurt that his wife had not brought luck. Maulana sahab had said in one of his burning fatwas that a woman’s piety brings luck. He had said that a bad woman who complains or looks at other men will convert a good man’s good deeds to sin and there will be no Barkat in his life.

His wife was a talkative woman and often complained that they hardly ever ate meat unlike the neighbor’s family. She had borne many children; some had died but for the past few years there had been no pregnancies. Probably she had become barren. There was nothing now left in her that was remotely like the young girl he had married. Her face was lined, her hair had become brittle and white, her skin, coarse and her body, a mass of folds.

One night, he sat squatted on the roadside island, ruminating . Maulana sahab must know, but he could not change his wife because he did not have enough money to marry a younger woman. His neighbor walked over and offered him a pinch of a new drug. He told him that an injection is even better. It is quick and he won’t even feel the prick. There was a cold wind blowing and one prick was not too much in return for a bit of warmth, or a bit of cold. So started Buta’s death.

The death concluded in the semi-cold December night across from Hasan Square. Buta died. It was a sudden slipping from a tenuous bond with life. For a moment he thought and in the next he knew. The noise dulled and he could hear the silence walking next to him.

He was walking? Just a little while ago he had been in a stupor with arms linked with another man under a dirty old sheet, floating.

Where? Almost immediately he was in front of the Allah Chowrangi. That itself convinced him he was dead.

"The Allah Chowrangi is an artist’s depiction of God’s universalism," droned a voice. Who said that? And why did he hear it? God must be Pepsi too. There is a Pepsi sign on the Chowrangi. Was Allah brown? Or aerated? Or in a can. Like canned humor. With a sob he found himself on his knees in front of Allah.

It was day. It seemed as though the day dawned too quickly. In his first sajda almost. A group of Afghan women came to squat on the traffic islands. With their toddlers. Lovely brightly colored dresses with swirling shalwars underneath. One picked up her dress and started to suckle the one year old baby. The other took a gauze piece and smeared mud on it. She wound it on the two children’s heads. Soon the traffic started coming. Cars stopped at the lights or did not as was the driver’s mood. The women tied the children’s shirts with long strips of cloth to the bushes on the traffic island. They brought out empty milk bottles and rushed over to the cars to beg and people dropped out rupees and coins. The women mumbled and grimaced. Some people were generous and gave several rupees. The sun rose with a ferocious heat and the little toddlers cried. The women packed more mud on the children’s heads.

A driver threw a cigarette butt on the island. A little child picked it up and put it in his mouth. Buta screamed and ran to take it from the child’s mouth. A car passed, over him, through him, from him, but he could not stop the child. During the long day, many times the women would stop by turns and play with their children, change their mud packs, or help them urinate. Days passed like these, but Buta stayed in front of Allah. He watched the child being sick a few hours later and the mothers in their idiocy putting grass in his mouth. The child had a burning fever, but the women did not take him to the doctor. Will he die? At least Buta would have company. He was sick with himself for the thought and prayed that the child would not die.

For the first time, he wished he lived, so that he could give a few pieces of fruit to the children and the mothers, but now it was too late. He had died and been condemned to spend his death in impotent rage in front of Allah.

The sun was like a bed of burning needles, piercing his soul. Somehow he had never though that hell could be so like Karachi. Everyday it seemed it could not get worse, but it did. The sun was ever hotter, the children more ill and the women poorer.

One day he got company. Next to the stone he often sat upon during a pause in the lines of cars driving through him, he saw another man. A bespectacled man. The man started talking and for a moment Buta though he was speaking to him. But he realized that the man was talking to himself .

The man sat and cried with great heaving sobs till Buta stopped paying attention to the big Pajero passing through him and cried out, "why do you cry?"

There was no reply but Buta kept calling out till the man told him to shut up. A glass of water seemed impossible so Buta consoled the man with thumps on the back.

The man became calm and began speaking. The man’s name was Pattey and he belonged to the same village as Buta. He was the same age as Buta and resembled Buta. But his clothes were different, he wore a watch and trousers, his hair was neatly cut and his teeth were white and complete. His hands were softer and whiter, he was fatter than Buta, with less hair and no head-lice. He told Buta that he had lived the life that Buta would have lived if he had been someone else, later than Buta, or earlier. He was the person that Buta had always dreamed about, the Buta Plus model.

Pattey died because it was time he stopped cheating. He screamed at that, and in a wild frenzy started throwing boulders at the monument. Buta tried to restrain him, but Pattey was uncontrollable. However, the boulders could do no harm; they lacked both force and materiality.

Many missed hits later, a tired Pattey again began his story. It seemed that Pattey knew more about the situation than Buta. But somehow Pattey was as impotent as Buta. He told Buta that he had always thought that Allah was a stone monument whom no amount of cajoling or tears could move. But he believed because it was right to believe in Allah. Buta in turn told Pattey how he had always thought that Allah was responsible so Buta did not have to be.

Pattey and Buta cried and talked and confessed while they walked in circles around the Chowrangi. Sometimes they ran and sometimes they crawled. All the while they argued.

A soft whisper or a sudden hoot is the only evidence that they speak at all.