Selection Week
A Short Story
By hurmat kazmi The New Yorker
In the beginning, it was him and the gecko.
I was probably the only one in the room who saw it, my eyes
secretly, partially, open. The fourteen other boys in the room stood
obediently, bent over—their underpants at their ankles, bottoms hoisted in the
air, like mine. Eyes shut. That was the only difference between me and them.
Them and me.
The gecko was directly above him, dull and textured like a
pebble. It hung upside down in the crack between the two walls, and I thought
it might fall, at any moment, into the crack of his raised ass. Out of one
crack, into another. I continued to stare at his body despite the looming
reptilian danger, but I was scared that if I stared too long my dick might
become hard, so I closed my eyes.
The silence in the room was interrupted by the drone of the
doctor’s voice: “All right now, eyes firmly shut, no looking here and there. I
want you all to grab your buttocks with your hands and stretch them as far
apart as possible, and when I tap your shoulders one by one I want you to cough
three times, loudly. Understood?” Silence. Which meant, yes, we understood.
The doctor was tall and sturdy, all muscles and rounded
shoulders. His uniform starched and crisp, three golden stars glistening on the
shoulder flaps. With a flashlight in one hand and a latex glove on the other,
he began his survey, tapping shoulders, observing our assholes, those beautiful
flowers that were now in full bloom.
After the medical screening, we waited in a large sitting
area. Meanwhile, the next group of fifteen boys was sent into the doctor’s
room. We were going to get our forms back shortly with
either fit or tuf (Temporarily Unfit) stamped on them. The
unfit would be let go.
In the sitting area, speculations were rife:
“Dude, what the fuck was that? Why do they check our
assholes?”
“They think we’re hiding national-security secrets there.”
“No, yaar! They just want to make sure no one ever went to
town on our bottoms. No place in the Pakistan Air Force for gandoos.”
An hour later, the medical assistant appeared. At that
moment I really wished that someone had dipped his dick in my ass so I would be
rejected then and there, but, despite the varicose veins in my scrotum, which
the doctor had fondled with stiff formality and suspicion, I was
declared fit. The three boys with tuf stamped on their forms
were asked to leave. The fit boys hugged and congratulated one
another for having made it through the first round. A wave of excitement swept
the room, saved as everyone was from the embarrassment of being sent back home
on the first day. He was in a corner, hugging two boys at the same time, a
tangle of limbs.
A group of boys came out of the doctor’s room, another went
in, and many more were waiting their turn. I wasn’t surprised at the number of
people who were applying to the Air Force. Growing up, I’d always known someone
who was trying to join the armed forces: the tailor’s son, the laundryman’s
nephew, a classmate’s neighbor. Once, on the way back from school, I chatted
with a rickshaw wallah and learned that before channeling his energies into his
three-wheeled vehicle he had applied to the military and been rejected. That’s
the way it was, it seemed. Before people did anything with their life, they
applied to the armed forces—and only after they had been rejected three
consecutive times, and hence rendered ineligible forever, did they think of
doing something else.
I applied, too. Not because I wanted to but because my father
had when he was my age, and he hadn’t made it. Didn’t matter that I didn’t want
to. I was already on a gap year after high school, having been rejected from
every single medical school that I’d tried for: Dow, Agha Khan, Ziauddin, even
Baqai. It was my year of shame and humiliation. I applied because I preferred
to spend a week away from home, away from my mother’s taunts and insults, her
constant comparisons with this or that friend of mine who had got into a med
school or an engineering program, was well on his way to starting life. I
applied to the Air Force to fulfill my middle-class parents’ middle-class
dreams—dreams that my upper-class high-school friends would respond to
with arrogant smiles and eye rolls. I didn’t tell anyone I was applying.
In the evening all of us—the sixty boys who had survived the
first day and been declared fit—were asked to gather in the academic
block. That was when I saw him again. Sitting on a chair two rows away from
mine, he looked in my direction and held my gaze for a little longer than was
necessary. His eyes were like the sun setting—you could really look into them
without feeling the sharp hurt of staring at something forbidden. He waved his
stack of light-pink papers in my direction and smiled as if he had just won an
award. For a while I indulged his gaze simply because he was attractive, like
so many of the boys in my school whom I would stare at from a distance and
never approach, boys whose pictures I would talk to on my phone at night or
fantasize about before sleeping. Then, realizing that someone somewhere in the
room must be looking at us looking at each other, I rolled my eyes from him to
the window. Outside, the trees stood still.
The heat of the bodies in the room was stifling. As I waited
for the registration process to begin, I rehearsed monologues that, on my
return home, I would deliver with great enthusiasm and mock disappointment
about the unpunctuality of the I.S.S.B. staff—monologues that would ultimately
exasperate my father, whose singsong praises of the Army’s and the Air Force’s
infatuation with time management was all I had heard in the days preceding my
arrival here. I would also complain about the sticky dust, the broken chairs,
the defunct fans, the geckos on the walls, the clusters of mosquitoes, the
ripe, festering smell of sweat, the lack of boys from Karachi, the abundance of
boys from Rawalpindi, Gujranwala, Mianwali, Tando Adam, Mirpur Khas, Multan,
Dera Ghazi Khan, Sukkur, Larkana, Mithi—boys with whom I had nothing in common
except sex and age.
When the I.S.S.B. staff arrived, our baggage was searched,
our documents were verified, and our phones were confiscated. Later in the
evening we were served tea and then a dinner of aloo gosht and roti. At eight
sharp we were asked to return to our rooms, which would then be locked from the
outside.
The rooms looked more like hospital wards, oblong, white
paint peeling off in large flakes. There were twelve beds, six on each side,
rusty wrought-iron affairs. I could not sleep. The wind in the trees outside
was more pronounced now, the song it sang. A subdued, powdery gray cut through
the darkness of the room.
It was the twentieth of Muharram, the day of the annual
ladies’ majlis at our house. It was the first time in my life that I had missed
it. What was I doing in this strange, threatening place? Threatening like a bed
of nails, a land full of mines. All day the masculinity of the boys around me
had made me aware of my own femininity. At school I had found solace in female
friendship, at home in the company of my sisters. How had I got so far in the
process? Could I make it to the end? Be rewarded with a uniform, blue like a
rare bird? No, it did not matter, I told myself. In four days, at most, I would
be out of this place, would never see any of these boys again in my life. I
could fake it for this short while.
In the morning, he asked me if I recognized him. This was a
little after four o’clock, after a fervent banging on our doors had jolted us
from sleep, after we had rushed to the bathrooms—towels, toothbrushes,
toothpastes, trimmers in hand—after, turn by turn, each of us relieved
ourselves in stalls where the smell of shit was so strong that we had to cover
our noses with our shirts, after we had washed up, shaved, combed, dressed, become
ready for the day, tip-top, fauji style.
He approached me as I stood outside the dining hall. I was
staring absent-mindedly at the itinerary on the notice board, squinting,
feigning interest.
“Hey, remember me?” he said, tapping my shoulder.
“Hey, I am sorry. I don’t.”
“We were together during the initial medical test, and I
think I also saw you in the registration room yesterday.”
“Did you? I don’t think I saw you.”
“Oh.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans.
And then, “What city are you from?”
“Karachi,” I said.
“From around here only—nice, yaar. I am from Lahore.”
“Cool.”
He volunteered his name and presented his hand and I offered
mine—his grip firm, providing both a mild pain and a warm comfort.
The knob jangled and the door to the dining hall yawned
open. We walked in together and, despite the commotion of famished boys that
almost separated us, we ended up sitting next to each other. This made me
utterly self-conscious. I was suddenly all too aware of the hairiness of my
arms, of my elbows a shade darker and drier than the rest of my skin, of the
way my tight shirt accentuated the lack of muscles on my body. We ate in
silence, or at least I avoided speaking for fear of exposing a smear of food
accidentally left on my teeth. Somewhere across the room a boy clinked his fork
and clattered his plate a bit too loudly. Two superintendents stood like palace
guards, observing us, scrutinizing every movement.
After breakfast we were asked to gather in the foyer. The
group testing officers were about to arrive. Together with the psychologist and
the president of the I.S.S.B., the G.T.O.s had a say in who got selected and
who didn’t. The superintendents, reading our names from a list, divided us into
six groups of ten. When the G.T.O.s arrived—each of them a variation of the
other: butts bobbing in their fitted blue pants, hair trimmed to expose the
sheen of their scalps, half a dozen medals pinned to their chests—they took
charge of the six wings.
He and I were in different wings. Throughout the morning we
sat for tests with our own group. At lunch, we were at different tables.
After lunch we had the rest of the day to ourselves. Most of
the boys changed into more casual clothes. Everyone gathered in the anteroom,
which, with its offerings of snooker, chess, table tennis, snakes and ladders,
carom board, and a large TV, was the most appealing place in I.S.S.B. The
anteroom contained so many photographs that I could not tell what color the
walls were. Army generals, naval chiefs, air marshals, martyrs of the 1965 war,
the Quaid himself—all huddled against one another, rubbing shoulders.
The TV had only twelve channels—all of which played either
patriotic anthems or documentaries about the armed forces—and I was nervous
about inserting myself into the groups of boys hunched over this board game or
that, so I sat alone, observing everyone. Many of these boys must have failed
med-school entrance exams, like me. Many of them would settle for modest jobs
in pharmacy or tech. But here they were, smelling of old sweat, with their
bedraggled clothes and scraggly mustaches, fully convinced that they had a fair
and equal chance of making it into one of the most full-of-itself professions
in the country. In the best-case scenario, only one of them would get selected.
Then, there was another, much smaller group of boys—even from a distance you
could tell them apart. These were the sons of serving armed officers, and, with
their hair tamed by pomade and styled into shimmering puffs, clothes tailored
specifically for the selection week, shoes polished to reflect their faces,
they could blind you with their shine—a shine that was inherited, yes, but
burnished further by months of training at Army bases, favors of their colonel
and brigadier uncles. One of those uncles, or perhaps even their own fathers,
must have been a former president of the I.S.S.B. For them, appearing before
the selection committee was just a formality.
I was too good for one group and not good enough for the
other, so I settled for him. At least he was beautiful; his rosy thin lips and
eyes like hungry fishes in a bowl. He was idling on the sofa, talking to
another boy. I went up to him and asked if he wanted to take a walk outside,
maybe go to the tuckshop.
Small purple-black fruits had fallen on the rocky,
bituminous pavement, their insides splattered, seeping into the cracks. Along
the broad pathway leading to the tuckshop, under a Gulmohar tree, a sign wished
us “Good Luck.” The old and crinkly man at the shop was unboxing some snacks,
dabbing at sweat on his forehead and eyelids with a handkerchief he kept draped
over his shoulder. I bought only a bottle of Pepsi, he got a few things—Chili
Mili, Cocomo, Kurkure, Pakola. Then we walked back.
The outer wall of the compound, which faced the main road,
was half red brick and half filigreed black grille. Cars sped by, giving
evidence of life outside. From the spot where we now sat on the large lawn,
between the main building and the entrance, one could see the façade where an
inscription read:
inter services selection board
“We Recruit the Defenders of Pakistan”
On the lawn were grimy white benches with bird droppings all
over. The sun was beginning to set, the sky deepening into crimson and cobalt.
Clusters of rickety insects clung to lampposts that were just coming to life,
the mild light illuminating their emerald-and-burgundy bodies, their
fluttering, opaque wings. There was an obsolete F-86 displayed in a corner of
the compound, a replica of the one used by M. M. Alam in the Indo-Pak war
of 1965. I did not know this but read it on a placard as we sat under the jet’s
silvery, rusted wings.
For a while we talked about mundane things. I liked reading,
he was into cricket and football; I had recently completed my A levels with mediocre
grades, he his Intermediate with a passing percentage. He kept asking questions
to propel the conversation. Where did I live? How had my tests gone that
morning—math, physics, I.Q., general knowledge, psychological analysis, the
Officer-Like Qualities test? Was the answer to the so-and-so MCQ on the
so-and-so test A or B? We had different answers; we both were probably wrong.
The lagging music of his Punjabi accent clung to his Urdu
like ants to a sticky, hard candy, but he talked with an ease and comfort,
volunteering information that, if I were him, I wouldn’t tell someone I had met
just a day ago. His father lived illegally in Dubai and worked in construction,
sending scant cash whenever he could. He hadn’t seen him in ten years. His
mother, now ailing, had retired from her job as a nurse in a government
hospital in Raiwind. A younger sister was still in school. He wanted to join
the Air Force to offer his family a better life.
“Are you serious about the Air Force?” he asked, the veins
in his neck blue, bulging.
“Yes,” I said, reflexively. “It’s my passion.”
As we spoke, our bodies touched occasionally. At every
touch—casual and inert though it was—I glanced at the point of contact, but he
made nothing of it, his eyes roving around the compound.
He peeled open a half roll of Zeera biscuits and offered
them to me. I took one. He kept dropping tiny crumbs on his lap which resembled
the scintillas of dandruff on his shoulders. He slurped his Pakola in large
gulps, chewed with his mouth open. He was wearing the same ill-fitting clothes
that he had worn yesterday: faded bluejeans, wrinkled white in places, and a
black T-shirt with “i lost my number can i have yours” printed on it in a big
yellow cursive font. I watched him eat and drink and talk, and my understanding
of how different he was from me deepened. How humble and innocent. How rich in
his poverty. I realized I would be embarrassed if my friends saw me with him. I
felt a mixture of lust and revulsion. Mostly, I felt a little sad. In him I had
placed the hopes of a friendship, perhaps something even more than a
friendship, that would continue outside this place. But the impossibility of
such a situation, an impossibility that was both practical and personal, was
beginning to be revealed to me.
“We are going to get fucked tomorrow,” he said then, and
that seemed to stir something inside me, a desire, an exhilaration—the plain,
blatant charge of the word he had used.
Emboldened, as if what he had said were a cue, I raised my
hand and dusted the crumbs from his shirt. He looked at me, surprised, but did
not recoil. Just smiled. Then he looked at his crotch, where more crumbs had
gathered.
“Should I?” I asked. The loudspeakers on the minaret of the
small white-marbled mosque in the corner of the compound came to life, ejecting
sharp, static noises. The Maghrib azan was about to begin.
“Oh, no, it’s fine,” he said, getting up and patting his
thighs, the crumbs falling like debris. “We should go to the mosque and pray
with the other boys.”
I shrugged. “You can go. I don’t pray.”
“You can pretend to.” He looked thoughtful. “My chaachoo is
a Subedar in the Army. He said they are always watching us, these I.S.S.B.
people. In the dining hall, in the anteroom. Everywhere. They don’t just look
at your tests and interviews and how well you perform the physical tasks.”
“So, you’re saying that man over there could possibly
be a lieutenant colonel, dressed as a gardener?” I asked, looking toward the
other side of the lawn where a maali was watering the rows of bougainvillea and
amaltas trees.
He laughed. “Maybe. In that case, let’s go.”
In the mosque, I stood at a distance for a while, casting my
eyes around to see if there was any other Shia guy, praying separately from the
rest, hands resting at his sides. But there was no one else. And, because I did
not want to set myself apart, I prayed with everyone else, my hands folded in
front of me, something I had never done in my whole life, not even at the
funeral of my grandfather, who was half Sunni and had had two different funeral
prayers for that reason.
After the prayer, we all gathered outside the dining room
because it was time for the day’s results to be posted on the notice board. I
did not want to be rejected just yet. I wanted to be able to spend more time
with him. When the superintendent arrived with a sheet of paper, the boys
started pushing and shoving one another, desperate to see their names. I stood
in a corner, patiently. Since the I.S.S.B. gods were watching all the time, I
wanted to show them that I had Officer-Like Qualities.
Twenty-three boys had failed the tests. They had to be let
go before dinner was served. If there was any justice in these things, my name
should not have been on the list. I had played a game of eeny, meeny,
miny, moe in marking my answers on all the tests, and I was sure I would be
sent home today—but my name was there. So was his. I whispered it to myself,
and it sounded like chimes on a windy day.
At night, once more, I could not sleep. There was an
incessant hiss of crickets, and somewhere in the compound dogs barked
curiously. I wished he were in my room, in the bed next to mine. I tried to
imagine what he looked like while sleeping, whether he slept with his mouth
open or closed, whether he snored, whether he slept with his shirt on or off,
whether he slept with his arms folded behind his head, exposing sleek
fluffs of hair in his armpits. Whether he liked me.
From tomorrow, I promised myself, I would try my best. I did
not know what to do with my life; I wasn’t good at anything. Maybe this was the
way out, away from the vitriolic insults of my family, away from the incessant
pressures of entrance exams. Suddenly, I felt free. I imagined a future in
which he and I were both selected. We would spend two years training together
at the Risalpur Academy. We would both graduate as flying officers, deeply and
madly in love with each other. It was wishful thinking, I knew, but the fantasy
settled like a warm blanket over me and put me to sleep.
In the morning my head was throbbing. My stubble was slick
with strands of saliva. I woke up with the desire to work harder intact, but I
was nervous about a whole day of physical tasks and interviews. During
breakfast, I felt dizzy with headache, the racking pain seeping out of my head
and splitting the air. He walked in late for breakfast, found a place to sit
quite far from me. Our eyes did not meet. After breakfast we were asked to wear
our very tight white shirts and very short white shorts and gather outside.
That was the dress code for the Physical Tasks.
The shadows of the trees on the ground rippled and swelled.
I went and stood with a group of boys, of the Army-kids variety. Soon a few
perfunctory questions were exchanged; I felt a sense of validation, acceptance.
I kept my hands as still as I could, my spine stiffened. From time to time, I
glanced at him, standing with a group of boys who radiated a fanatic, rampant
Lahori energy. He was talking, high-fiving, laughter in the air, a laughter
that hinted at the jubilance boys slip into when they talk about
girls. He looked like an athlete in his white shirt and white shorts, dull
against his lambent, wet-sand-colored skin. Something rose in me then, a
feeling too familiar—a lust too strong to be merely physical, a desire too weak
to be devotion. It was a feeling I had stifled before, a feeling I knew how to
fold and tuck into a corner of my heart.
I had never been any good at sports; the P.T. teacher at my
school used to call me a sissy. A group testing officer walked us to a far-off
field, beyond the back wall of the I.S.S.B. compound. A small rusted black gate
opened into a whole other world, an expanse of hay-brown grass, muddy and
spackled in places with wild shrubbery. There was an assortment of hurdles that
we had to run over, ditches of various sizes that we had to jump, rope ladders
that we had to climb, monkey bridges that we had to cross, puddles of thick mud
under barbed wire that we had to crawl through. There were fourteen obstacles
in total, and each of us had ten minutes to do them. I managed to do six. The
cutoff was five.
In the afternoon, when we met again, he gave me a lazy,
boyish hug.
“Lag gaye, yaar,” he said.
“I know. My whole body hurts, too.”
Both of us were tired and sunburned—dishevelled, but not completely
broken by the Physical Tasks. We showed each other the minor injuries we had
collected. One of the boys had broken two of his fingers, and another had
dislocated his ankle. These boys were sent to the medical unit, after which
they would be let go. He had got through twelve obstacles, which by any
standard was extraordinary; later, impressed, the other boys would rave about
it, most of them having themselves tackled only nine or ten obstacles at best.
Embarrassed, I lied and said that I had completed eight.
Lunch was about to be served, so we hung around in the
corridor. Apricot-yellow sunlight filtered through the patterns on the wall of
the hallway and fell on his face in an odd geometry, slicing through his
chocolaty eyes. Under the sun his skin was the color of rusty iron. Sweat
dripped down his sideburns. On his shirt, there were damp half-moons near his
armpits.
After lunch, everyone raced to the bathrooms. The interviews
were in the evening, and everybody wanted to shower and shave. The smell of
cheap perfumes was pervasive—Drakkar, Rumba, Maxi, Prophecy, Brut. In front of
the mirror, a boy was flossing his teeth with a thread pulled from the sleeve
of his T-shirt; another rubbed his teeth with powdered charcoal. Inside the
door of a stall, someone had drawn a penis and a circle. There was a phone
number scribbled under the drawing, and next to it a few faded words: “Suck
Pervez Musharraf’s cock.”
Ihad heard all kinds of things about I.S.S.B. interviews.
One of my cousins had told me that during his interview the president had
switched off the light in his office for a few seconds and then asked my cousin
what had changed. My cousin made up some theory about the laws of
thermodynamics and light intensity, but the president replied, “Time, only time
changed.” The first thing I noticed when I entered this president’s office was
his paunch, neatly tucked beneath the desk. He had no neck. Assalamoaleikum,
Waalaikumassalam. When I sat down, his head obstructed my view of the slogan
printed on the wall behind him: “excellence is not a skill, it’s an
attitude.” He asked me to tell him about myself and why I wanted to join the
Air Force, and while I did so he made circular motions in his ear with his
finger. It came out with a smattering of pale-yellow earwax. The rest of the
interview was a litany of questions: Who is the defense minister of Pakistan?
Does the Pakistan Navy have helicopters? Which ones? How much
is xyz kilometres in square feet? What’s the capital of Sudan? Do you
have any family members in the armed forces? What’s your household income? So,
you are Shia? Name the Twelve Imams. Recite Naad e Ali. When the interview was
over, I thanked him for his time. As I was getting up to leave, he dropped his
pen on the floor. Uncertain about what to do, I bent down and reached for it.
“Don’t!” he yelled at me, and pressed a buzzer on his desk.
The door opened, a superintendent entered and, without being told what was
needed, picked up the pen, placed it on the president’s desk, and took his
leave. A rehearsed trick, I realized; to pick up a fallen object from the floor
was beneath the dignity of an armed officer. I had failed.
The interview with the psychologist was shorter, more
personal, and devoid of any preposterous theatrics: You are the only son of
your parents; how will they feel if you die fighting for Pakistan? Do you
have a girlfriend? No? A boyfriend, then? It’s so common these days, you know.
When was the last time you had sex? Have you ever had anal sex? Do you watch
porn? Do you masturbate? I said I did not remember the last time I had done so.
She was clever, the psychologist, a small black mole above her lips, like the
infamous Indian TV-soap lady villain Komolika. Her eyes were like a needle to
the skin, possessing a sharpness that did not merely see but saw through.
Come evening, everyone was relieved, ecstatic even. It was
over, and on top of that no one was being sent home tonight. The results were
to be posted the next morning. There was excitement among the boys because at
8 p.m. one of the TV channels would air a Pakistani movie. It was a
low-budget Lollywood ripoff of a Bollywood film, which itself was a copy of a
Tollywood film. I had no interest in the movie, so I decided to return to my
room and read. I was a few pages into my book when he came into the room
looking for me.
“Oye, kya hua? Not watching the movie?”
“Hey, I am not feeling well, and I have seen the movie
before,” I said, lying.
He stood near my bed and touched my forehead with the back
of his hand. “Fever?”
“I don’t know, just not feeling great.”
He sat down next to me on the bed. “How was your interview?”
he asked.
“It was O.K. The president was a prick”—instinctively, I
felt the need to remedy the lie I had told him the day before, and after a
pause I said, “You know, I lied earlier. I did not want to get selected
initially, but now I think I do. Like, I wouldn’t mind it.”
“I knew you did,” he said, a smile cutting into his cheeks.
“I know you knew.” I smiled back.
“And you’re not tall enough for the Air Force anyway,” he
said teasingly.
“Shut up! I am taller than you.”
“No, you’re not!”
“O.K., let’s see,” I said, getting up from the bed. I took
his hand and made him stand, too, his touch softly textured like gauzy fabric.
We stood face to face, our chests touching.
“Look, I am taller,” he said, joking.
He wasn’t taller than me. My nose was level with the top of
his head. I could smell the metallic fragrance that rose from his hair.
“Let’s lie down and check,” I said. “It’s more accurate that
way.”
“You’re crazy!” he said, laughing.
“C’mon!” I tugged at his hand, getting into bed and pulling
him to it.
He laughed again; he acquiesced. He lay down on the bed,
both hands resting on his chest, as if in prayer. “Now what?” he said to the
ceiling.
I was next to him, propped up on an elbow, staring at his
face. Silent.
“Happy?” he asked, placing his palms on the bed, lifting his
back.
I was happy; I grabbed his arm and held him down. A tint of
white from the tube light overhead hovered on his hair, shattered in his eyes.
Bursts of laughter and clapping came from the anteroom across the hallway. I
continued to stare at him. I imagined what lay beneath the layers of his
clothing: a constellation of hard pink pimples on his chest, and a few tiny
white pus-filled ones, too, barely camouflaged by a thin film of hair; unhard
dick, flimsy and shrivelled—like a dead sea horse washed up on the
shore—resting above his coarsely shaved pubic hair.
“Let me get up now,” he said, trying to free himself from my
grip.
Keeping him pinned under me, I placed my head on his chest,
heard two distinct beats of his heart, thrumming like frogs in a pond; small,
silvery coins of pure joy jangled in the pockets of my own heart.
Then he pushed me. “What the hell are you doing?”
As soon as he sat up and ran his hand through his hair, the
door to the room slammed shut; we heard the sound of a bolt being fastened on
the outside. A rope tightened around my neck. We ran to the door and shoved it.
We banged on the door, screaming into it: open it, who is it, please unlock the
door. Half an hour later, when the door opened, the resident officer was behind
it.
In the president’s office, a naked bulb hung from a wire
above the desk, illuminating stacks of papers and khaki envelopes. The resident
officer was in a corner, leaning against the wall, alternating between staring
out of the dark window and typing furiously into his small Nokia, ignoring our
joint pleas and apologies.
Two headlights came into view in the window as a car
serpentined toward the office building.
The president entered and switched on the main lights;
blinding brightness exploded in the room. He was wearing a shalwar kameez, not
his uniform. He told the resident officer to have someone send tea for madam
and juices for the children; his wife and kids were waiting for him outside, in
the car. It was Friday night. I imagined a little skirmish must have taken
place at the president’s house when the call came. The kids must have cried out
in protest as their plan to go to KFC or McDonald’s or some play area was
stalled by this call from one of their baba’s friends. But, Baba, you promised!
We were supposed to take the kids out tonight, the wife must have joined in. I
am sorry, jaan, but something urgent has come up. Why don’t you guys come
along, and we can eat at the officers’ mess tonight? It was eerie to think that
the president had a life outside the I.S.S.B. That he, like the rest of us, was
answerable to a family.
“Hello, Mister. I am talking to you. Are you deaf?” The
president snapped his fingers, waving the R.O.’s phone in my face.
On its screen, a blurred and bleary photo, awash in sepia
colors, and in it the bodies of two boys joined in a way they should not be—the
faces, indiscernible, our own.
Hot tears began accumulating in my eyes, flowing down my
face of their own volition. A tremor caught in my throat. “Sir, I was
just—”
“Sir, we did absolutely nothing wrong,” he interrupted,
speaking with conviction and drawing the president’s attention away from me.
“We should not be detained like this. We were just resting together.”
“Shut up! Speak when you are spoken to,” the president
snapped at him, and then, turning back to me, he said, “You are the Shia boy,
aren’t you? What was your name?”
He smiled and nodded as I offered it to him.
“Getting up to all kinds of dirty things during
Muharram, huh? Shameful,” he spat. Then, after a sigh, he said, “You should be
glad I am a Syed, too. Don’t want to make a Yazeed out of myself by punishing
another Syed, especially during these holy days.”
I stared at him—vibrating with fear, the tears stinging my
eyes—but somehow filled with optimism.
The president was staring at the wall clock behind me.
“You can go back to your room,” he said.
“Thank you, sir. Thank you so much!” I replied.
Both of us looked at each other, stunned and shining with
relief, and made to leave the office.
“Hey, not you. Where do you think you’re going?” the
president said to him.
His smile turned to ice and melted under the heat of the
president’s glare.
“Talking back to me and thinking you’re some kind of a hot
shot? That, too, after talking this boy into all the filthy things you’re
into,” the president said. He asked him his name. When he told him, the
president and the R.O. exchanged a look. The president nodded toward the R.O.,
more to give permission than to affirm. The R.O. fumbled with a few pages on
the president’s desk and then produced a thin khaki envelope. “Final List
[Confidential].”
The president tore the envelope open with his thick, tapered
fingers. He held the paper up toward the R.O., the light from behind his head
illuminating its thin, membrane-like surface. Five names were printed in bold
in the center.
“You mess around, you mess up,” the president said, and laughed.
“Sir, please, please let us both go. We are extremely sorry,
sir. We will never do anything like that ever again,” I pleaded, shivering, my
hand already on the door handle.
“Listen up, boy. I want you to shut up and fuck off from
here,” the president said. “You won’t get another chance. Don’t make me change
my mind.”
I glanced at his boyish face, now grave and scared. His
unyielding will had dissipated; eyes like teacups filled to the brim, lips like
dead birds. He kept swallowing hard, as if there were a ball of hair suspended
in his throat. My focus blurred, or I made it blur, looking not at him but past
him—past the crumpled expression of fear on his face, past the sharp hurt of
someone who has been betrayed—settling on his hazy outlines. I thought of my
parents, who were already going to be so furious that I hadn’t made it. I
thought of the time they had brought the flyswatter down on the palms of my
hands for wrapping my sister’s dupatta around my body. I imagined them finding
out what I had done in this place. I looked away, opened the door, and quietly
fucked off from the president’s office.
The sky was dark, empty of birds. At the main building, boys
were exiting the anteroom and being ushered toward the dining hall by the
superintendents. Surely the superintendents must know what had happened, must
have sent the pictures of us to the R.O. I thought it would be best to tell
them that the president had exonerated me before they tried to create a scene.
My right leg had fallen asleep; hot needles prickled the bottom of my foot. The
smell of my sweat reached me, olid and milkier than it had been all day. As I
approached one of the superintendents, hands shaking, he looked at me as if he
were seeing me for the first time in his life. Smiling.
“Come on, beta. Hurry up! It’s dinnertime. Don’t keep the
food waiting. It’s bad luck,” he said.
Inside, I spotted a boy I had spoken to earlier. His table
was half empty. I quickly sat next to him. With the fingers of one hand, I
peeled the dead skin under the fingernails of the other.
“What happened to you? Seen a ghost?” he asked.
“How was the movie?” I pulled my face together, countered
his question.
“Yaar, bhenchod! The movie was fucking amazing. But right
before the ending they shut it down. The superintendent says some shit has gone
down. Do you know what happened?”
“No. I was taking a nap in the room,” I said. “I am not
well.”
I felt nauseated, could not eat, but I did not dare abandon
my food for fear of being reprimanded. I shoved large bites into my mouth. As
soon as I was finished, I rushed to the bathroom and threw up in the basin.
Chunks of chicken tikka and paratha clogged the sink. I looked away and swirled
my finger in the beige-colored smudge to unclog the drain. I rinsed my mouth
and washed my hands.
Ilay awake for a long time, watching the still and billowing
shadows converge on the walls. A chill settled in me, or perhaps it was guilt,
fluttering its wings in my chest. It was foolish, reckless, what we had done. I
had done. I said his name out loud to myself: Babar, Babar, Babar. The words
felt like broken teeth in my mouth. We would never have talked had he not
accosted me. I would have spent my days here in seclusion; I had learned to
make myself invisible around other boys. What had he seen in me on the first
day, when he sat several rows away and smiled at me and waved in my direction?
Had he seen himself reflected in my eyes? Did this reflection kindle in him a
platonic want—the desire to know and be known? And at what cost had this
reflection come? Behind the veneer of my sleek clothes and a plagiarized
sophistication, did he see the potential for cruelty? And behind the borrowed
sense of haughtiness and an accent that was sharpened to impress and charm, did
he see my willingness to be selfish? The cost of reaching out, of seeking, for
him, was this betrayal.
I saw something in him, too, and paid a price: he was just
an escape, from this place, from my family—the plan of a future that was not
possible, the map of a place that did not exist—and in chasing the promise of
these things, even transgressing in the process of possessing them, I realized
how cruel and heartless I could be, how childish in my selfishness. I felt
scalded by shame.
In Quetta, Shias were being slaughtered in the streets.
Their families had to protest with the corpses of their loved ones laid out on
beds of ice on the highway, before a federal minister or a governor responded
to their pleas. Elsewhere, too, Shia bodies were being torn apart by
explosives. My own family and I had escaped a bomb blast a couple of years ago
during the tenth of Muharram procession in Karachi. And here I was, acquitted,
free, simply because the president was Shia, too.
Just as I was thinking this, I heard the sound of a car
engine revving up outside, coming alive, like a feral animal roused from sleep.
Panic rose in me. I have to do something, anything, I thought. I had to get him
out, I had to stop the president, whose car was stuttering along the tarmac
path outside. I got up from my bed and ran to the door, knocked. I knocked for
a while, audible yet soft thumps, so as to not wake any of the boys, many of
whom were already snoring. Then I banged. Loud and wild and desperate. The
drumming sound drowned the initial waves of protests from the boys who had
started to stir in their beds. What are you doing? Have you gone mad? Missing
your mumma?
The first one arrived with a muted ferocity, hit the back of
my head, and fell to the floor with a thud. A low cackle emerged from a corner
of the room. Then another shoe, poorly aimed, hit the door. I continued to
pound. My indifference to the boys’ subtle, small acts of violence seemed to
have emboldened them, swirled something inside them, an excitement, a
last-night spirit of adventure. A half-filled bottle of water hit the center of
my spine; a dull ache slowly spread. I turned around. A wet towel hurled in my
direction made it as far as the middle of the room. Guffaws of laughter. A rain
of ordinary objects began to pour from all directions. I sat down on the floor,
folded my arms around my knees, sank my head in the hollow space between them.
Tears began to flow down my face and into my lap. Yes, I thought, this is what
I deserve.
I sat there for a long time. Eventually, the boys got bored and
went back to sleep. Unbidden, I thought of his smile on the first day—bright
and capricious—and the strange storm on his face when I left him in the
president’s office. What would the president do to him? Beat him up? Rape him?
Hand him to intelligence? I imagined him sitting in a chair in the center of
the office, the president hurling insults at him. No place in the Air Force for
gandoos! The psychologist would be there, too, standing in a corner, arms
akimbo, laughing a high-pitched laugh and saying, I knew you were a freak.
Through the first few minutes, he would stay calm, expressionless. Midway, he
would squeeze his eyes and clench his teeth to hold the tears back, and not
until he had butchered his tongue—blood trickling down the side of his lips and
soaking his stubble—would the president stop yelling at him.
All these thoughts were unbearable; I couldn’t go on. In the
morning I will find him, I imagined instead. I will bring the insides of his
smooth wrists to my split cheeks. I will show him the tattered map of bruises
on my body, and he will show me his. Each of us will say to the other, Look
what they did to me.
Near dawn it had rained. A mild, short-lived, brokenhearted
rain. Clouds the color of dirty socks hung low in the sky. Tea-colored puddles
had formed in the foliage. I couldn’t find him. He wasn’t in his room and was
absent for breakfast. He wasn’t there when the final result was posted. He
wasn’t there to find out that only five boys had been selected, that one of the
boys was me. He wasn’t there when everyone else was asked to pack up and leave.
He wasn’t there for any of this. He had disappeared. Anything could have
happened to him. Though I told myself—as I would continue to tell myself for
years afterward—that in the end, during the night, he had simply been let
go. ?
