Uzma Khan - Trespassing

A paunchy elderly man replied, ‘The No Objection Certificate.’

Daanish laughed. ‘That’s a good one. What is it really?’

The paunchy man was equally confused. He dug under his kameez to scratch his stomach. ‘The NOC: No Objection Certificate. If they have no objection with you, they’ll give the NOC, and then you can deposit the chit and get a tanker.’

‘But how do they decide if they have an objection or not?’

The man tapped Daanish’s folder. ‘They check your documents.’

For the first time that day, Daanish looked inside the binder Anu had given him. There were bank statements, income tax returns, property tax forms, and a host of other signed and stamped papers. ‘But do we have to show these every time?’

The man gave him a look that said, You fool.

He was getting a terrible feeling about this. Most of those exiting did not bear the all-powerful chit. He’d left the house before eleven. It was now one-twenty. The office, the paunchy man disclosed, shut at two.

At a quarter to two, Daanish inched into the first ring. Crashing into a puddle, he at last saw the desk, chock-full of files. The man behind it consulted his watch every other minute, while a desperate father of four kept urging him to look a little harder for the file that would match the one he’d brought. ‘Maybe it’s under that pile.’ He pointed to one that was as much a pile as they were a line. Pages fluttered out as the tower collapsed, and the man behind the desk again studied the fake Omega. Five minutes to two. The father waved his documents under the man’s nose. ‘I’m sure you have a record of this somewhere here,’ he pleaded hysterically. ‘If you’ll just look.’

The watch struck two. The official slapped his hands on the desk. Daanish was pitched into the desperate father as the wave parted again and another woman appeared. She was quite young, quite pretty, and for a moment there was palpable hesitation. But lunch beckoned. The man rose. The crowd erupted in fury, ‘I’ve been coming here every day this week!’ ‘We’ve not even had drinking water!’ ‘My mother is ill!’ ‘How much? How much to make you stay?’

The official trotted toward the gate, meeting his colleague from the other desk along the way.

The desperate father shook his head. ‘Who has more sense: thieves like them or honest men like us?’

Daanish returned the next day. He couldn’t even squeeze into the second ring. So he stood at the back with Scarecrow, who’d lost count of how many days he’d been awaiting his turn. It was as if, more than even water, he wanted a place to speak his mind. He’d made the water office his venue.

‘Three million,’ he said. ‘Last year three million unlicensed guns were buying in country. The Afghan War ending three years ago, but guns keep coming. The Amreekans were arming and training us to fight the Communists but now we are left to fight ourselves.’ He shook his head. His entire body seemed to sway. ‘They just left, those Amreekans. They didn’t care what they leaving behind.’ Then he stared at Daanish. ‘You are going in Amreeka, I think?’

Daanish bolted. But it was too late: his two selves were squabbling. The Amreekan one argued that he had a right to act on his own interests, so stop complaining. The smaller replied that the other was powerful, rich, and in the habit of dropping old friends to whom he exported arms and torture equipment that made him even richer.

He squeezed into the fourth ring, and then the third, where the desperate father of four was on the cusp of madness. At two o’clock, Daanish once more returned home.

It had been five days since either he or Anu had showered or even washed. An uncle had twice brought them drinking water from his house. It was 36C° and humidity was ninety per cent. When he wiped off the sweat dripping down his face and neck he smeared gray filth over his body as though it were soap. Then he sat flicking the dirt out from between burgeoning fingernails. Should he cut them? It was too exhausting. Anyway, they’d only grow again. He began to chew them off, swallowing the slime wedged inside. Some particles he spat onto the increasingly soiled rug. Since he kept his door shut, the room was never swept. He’d rather live in filth than have his things disturbed further.

The next day, he wrestled the mob and staunchly stood at the desk before the lunch hour. He handed over his documents. The official frowned at each. He wore a dirty bush shirt and his hair, Daanish was amused to see, was no less greasy than his own. The air around him reeked of mustard and cheap cologne. The desperate father stood behind Daanish, with more documents, just as he’d been ordered. Daanish wished he had it in him to offer his place. But he did not. He had finally gotten a hearing. He deserved it. If others were denied what they also deserved, it had nothing to do with him.

The man searched through the clutter on the desk, shaking his head. He couldn’t find Dr Shafqat’s file. ‘We have no record of him.’

Daanish’s knees began to quake. ‘But I do. You have just gone through my file. All of them are stamped, official papers. All our bills are paid.’ He was astonished to find his voice cracking.

Scarecrow called from behind, ‘Give the Amreekan a break!’

The men around Daanish stirred. They examined his rumpled shirt, his jeans caked in dirt from all the days he’d worn them here. There was no sign of glittery Amreekan-ness. He looked as tattered as they, if not more.

‘If you’re from Amreeka,’ Omega said, ‘why have you come here?’

The others nodded, oblivious that the wily official was making time fly.

‘I am not from Amreeka,’ Daanish snapped. ‘And I’m here because I have no water, just like all the others around me who’ve been waiting for days for you to issue the No Objection Certificate. I object to all this waiting!’

Omega grinned. His teeth and gums were stained with paan and the long hand of his watch inched closer to the hour. When he laughed, so did some of the others he was putting off.

Daanish’s face flushed. ‘I continue to wait.’

‘Gently, gently,’ the man cooed. ‘All in good time.’ He sat back. ‘I was once given very good cigarettes by an Amreekan like yourself …’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘… Let me see, what were they called?’

‘You’re wasting these good people’s time.’

This finally triggered something in the others. ‘I want my turn before you go for lunch!’ one declared. More began protesting.

Omega sighed, sitting upright again. ‘Really, you do not look much like an Amreekan. Next.’

‘But you haven’t finished with me,’ Daanish yelled.

‘You will come back tomorrow and I will see where your file is.’

‘Tomorrow is Friday!’ He wanted to weep.

Panic broke. He was pushed and shoved as the men realized in another ten minutes the office would close for the next sixty-seven hours. He found himself beside Scarecrow again. The student slapped his back as though they’d become soul mates. ‘It is not like this in Amreeka, no? You are finding lines in offices and water in tapses?’

Anu was sitting in the TV lounge when a taxi dropped him home. He seemed to have lost his sense of smell. She too hadn’t washed but he noticed nothing different in her appearance or odor. She pushed back greasy hair from his sweaty forehead and kissed him. He never repulsed her.

‘I don’t know how you’ve done it all your life,’ he said, ‘shuttling back and forth for something this basic.’

‘They let me get in front,’ she replied. ‘But I have been sent home many times when they can’t find our file. You poor thing. I’ll go on Sunday.’ She wiped his sweat away with her dupatta, taking some of the dirt on his flesh with her.