Michael Gruber - The Good Son

We played that out too, in our games, Wazir haughty and brave as his own father, and my sister Aisha, two years younger than me, was our grandmother, Noor, and I was Laghari Sahib. The marauding mob of Hindus came out of Wazir’s imagination, and he was good, lots of violent threats, screams of rage, twisted face, clutching hands, and I would fight the Hindus with my tin knife while Aisha cowered behind me, until I was borne down by all the fiends Wazir was impersonating, and then switching back to his father again, a fine Pashtun speech here, elaborate threats and boasts, and then he would draw his pistol, an angled piece of pipe that contained as many shots as an Armalite, and slaughter the bestial Hindus. These sessions often left little Aisha in tears, which Wazir considered proof of their authenticity. When we wanted to play again, she always refused, and it was Wazir who had to cajole her to enter the game once again. This always worked: no one could resist Wazir, beautiful, masterful Wazir, the prince of our yard and, when we got older, of the neighborhood beyond.

In the afternoons, when I was eight and he was twelve, we would throw off our school uniforms and put on shalwar kameez and embroidered caps and walk through the Urdu Bazaar. Wazir, who seemed to know everyone, would flatter and joke and insult our way into free candies and hot fried dumplings and sticks of sugarcane, which always tasted sweeter than the ones bought for us. I followed him around like a dog.

That was my Pashtun life but I had another, or maybe it was two other lives. I was the grandson of B. B. Laghari Sahib, and I was being raised as a Punjabi gentleman and a citizen of Pakistan, a Lahori. As soon as I could read well enough, I was required to stand before him and recite Urdu poetry and also Wordsworth and Tennyson, because the heritage of the Raj was not to be despised. And Yeats. The Sahib was a little nuts about Yeats, I have to say; I think he identified with the old lunatic genius, the fact that he mastered the English language better than anyone else of his era yet was not himself English, that he was a statesman as well as a poet, that he had a view of the decline of the ordered world similar to Baba’s own. In any case, I was made to memorize huge chunks of Yeats’s poetry, which I did with a good will because I revered my grandfather and wanted his approval more than anything else in life except maybe the attention of my mother.

I went to the mosque on Fridays with the men and learned the prayers, although it was clear to me at an early age that Baba’s Islam was sentimental rather than devout. He didn’t, for example, serve wine at meals, but he had a decanter of whiskey in a locked cabinet, which he shared with select friends in the privacy of his study. At seven I was sent as a day student to Aitchison College. Wazir had preceded me there, and I was amazed to find the wild Pashtun boy transformed into a decorous scholar in blazer and shorts. Being several forms ahead of me, he could not officially recognize my existence at school, but I remember once asking him why he put up with it, and he said, “My father expects it and it is a matter of honor. I would be shamed not to do well before these Punjabis.” I did poorly myself: slow to read, the fat paragraphs of prose impossible to untangle. I was punished often and resented it. The only thing I was good at was memorizing poetry.

The third life was the one I shared with my mother, a secret life. For one thing, although she prayed conventionally enough with the other women, each Sunday she would wake me early and dress me and take me out of the house. We mounted her little 50cc Honda motorbike, me on the pillion behind, hugging her tight, and drove out of Anarkali down the Mall to Hall Road, where we parked in front of the Roman Catholic cathedral and went to mass. I can’t quite recall what I thought of this at the time. I knew my mother was strange and not like the other women of the household. I saw that Laghari Sahib treated her almost like an honorary man, so I guess I assumed she had a special God that was peculiar to her. There were statues of women in the cathedral but none in the mosque, and when I was very small I thought that these were statues of my mom. I didn’t take in much doctrine, but I was happy to have her to myself for a morning and grateful to the Catholic Church for providing it.

I have to say she was not a nurturing kind of mom, no great soft breast to hide in, the last resort of comfort; not at all like the other women I knew in my early life-Wazir’s mother, Nasha, or my old ayah, Faiza. Hugging Sonia was like hugging a boy.

Not that I lacked hugs. From birth I had Faiza, who bathed and dressed me and kissed away my little hurts and spoke to me in the languages of that country, so that I spoke them like the native I was. The awkward part of this traditional arrangement was that Faiza worked not for my mother but for Noor, my grandmother, called Bibiji by the household. It was apparent to Bibiji that a crazy American woman couldn’t possibly be trusted to raise the heir of the eldest son, so when I was small she took over my rearing entirely.

This was wonderful and terrible at the same time. It was wonderful because I was the little prince among the begums, Bibiji and her perfumed gold-jangling court, the aunties and the friends, all cooing and pinching and hugging and stuffing me with sweetmeats: barfis, gulaab jamuns, jalebis. Lahore is one of the world centers of sweetmeats, and I would have blown up like a football had my mother’s lanky genes not turned out to be proof against that. It was also horrible, because the hugs were too hard and the pinches too painful and the perfumes often smotheringly dense; the talk, too, mainly knocked my mother and the foolishness of my father for bringing such a one into the Laghari family.

My mother left us for almost two years, starting when I was three and Aisha was one, so I spent those formative years unprotected amid the poisoned candy. I should have become one of those plump and indolent Punjabi men, spoiled in the way that only tyrannized women can spoil their sons, but for some reason it didn’t happen. I remember very well when she returned to Lahore, tough, lean, and burned as black as a Sindi peasant, shocking the pale aunties and me, too; I ran screaming from her embrace. But after some days of thrilling, nervous courtship she lured me back pretty well, with little treats and presents and the gift of her attention, making me her slave until she was ready to tie on her rubber dick and ditch me again.

I suppose you’d have to call our relationship romantic, in that it involved secrets, like our slipping away to church, and a kind of yearning pursuit on my part. I know she hid from me. There was on our roof an assembly of huge ceramic vases that contained a collection of palms and cycads. It served as sort of a backdrop when we had parties up there and shielded part of the roof from neighboring windows. I once found her there, after a frantic search, behind the palms, sitting on a charpoy, writing in a notebook. I recall spying on her in her hideout and then tiptoeing away, coming back again and again when I couldn’t find her elsewhere.

Eventually I must have made some sound because she caught me and invited me into the tiny space. I asked her what she was doing and she said she was making privacy. She said, “Lahore is wonderful and the house is wonderful and the family is too, and don’t think I’m not grateful, but they haven’t invented privacy here yet and I need it.” Then she told me about how when she was in the circus and she wanted to get away from everyone she would crawl into one of the trucks and burrow down into the piles of packing mats and make a little cave for herself where no one could find her.

I liked it when she talked about her time in the circus and I asked her questions about it, only some of which she answered. Later that day I think we played with cards. She always had a deck on her, and she amazed me with card tricks and taught me, when I was old enough, how to rig a deck and deal from the bottom. She could deal from the middle, too, but I was never good enough to do that. Anyway, the next time I went up to the palm cave she wasn’t there. I never found her new hiding place.