Spirit of a Mountain Wolf (5 page)

Javaid gave a heavy sigh. “It’s only thirty miles across the mountains.”

Just then, a little girl flew into his arms. “Abu ji, you are home early. You have a surprise?”

Javaid smiled at her and pulled a bubblegum from his pocket.

“Yum, Hubba Bubba, my favorite.”

Javaid hugged her tightly.
Thank God she was safe.

“Abu?” the little girl said.

“Ji, Sakina?”

“Are you happy?” Her little face puckered around her eyes.

“Ji beti, I am happy. I have you to love.” Then he turned to Amina. “I’ll leave tonight, take a bus north.”

Javaid took a rickshaw to a bus terminal on the Grand Trunk Road. It was 8:00
p.m
. He bought a ticket and drank a cup of chai at a kacha, or makeshift, restaurant while he waited. He glanced around at the grimy wooden walls, the fly spots on the table, and shrugged. Most people were poor and did the best they could, he knew. So many like himself came from rural areas to make a living in the city, to have a better future for their families. He had been more fortunate than most: his talents in math and computers meant he was truly the one who ran the business of the Fazal Clothing Emporium. He smiled to himself; it was a fancy name for what was really only a shop, but Waqar’s grandfather had named it that after the Partition. Now Amina didn’t have to slave with animals like her mother had, and Sakina could go to school. Education for girls was accepted in the city. Maybe when he had enough money, he could start a school for girls in the mountains. But would anyone use it? He knew his brother’s view on educating girls: “It will only cause trouble. They will think they know more than men and get argumentative.”

Javaid clenched his fingers around the chipped cup. These thoughts made him wish the bus would hurry up and leave. How badly had Kala Dhaka been hit? There was no accurate news.

He heard a boy call a destination: “Oghi, Oghi, Oghi.” Javaid pushed away the cup, picked up his backpack, and boarded the bus. He sat near the front; he knew from experience that the rear of the bus was bumpy enough to put his spine out of line.

Once they reached Abbottabad, the journey to Oghi took twice as long as usual due to a fresh landslide. After a harrowing jeep ride along a potholed bitumen road into the tribal areas, Javaid finally reached Kala Dhaka the next day. He stopped at the village above the river where the mountain people got many of their supplies. It was early morning and bitterly cold. He wrapped his goat’s hair shawl around himself, a gift from his mother before she died. He felt a twinge of guilt: he should have come home more often. Little Tameem’s funeral was the last time, almost a year ago. His mother’s funeral the time before that. Was it only death and marriages that brought him home?

“God willing, let it not be death this time,” he murmured.

He shouldered his backpack and made his way to the mosque and madrasah. He had gone to the madrasah as a boy and not many of his memories were good. It wasn’t where he had learned his math, English, and computing. He’d taken night classes for those in the city.

Javaid was met by a pile of rubble where once the madrasah had stood—rock, cement, and wood all tumbled together like rubbish. A sickening feeling uncurled in his gut. Razaq would be fourteen, too old for the madrasah, wouldn’t he?

He raced across to the mosque. It looked abandoned. He stopped a man carrying food in plastic bags. “Excuse me, where is the maulvi?”

“The maulvi died,” the man said. “A wall fell on him.”

Javaid walked around the village in a daze. Some of the better-built houses still stood, though they were damaged, but there was no life inside. Then there were the piles of rubble that had once been houses. One of these was the home of Amina’s Auntie Latifa.

He couldn’t put off going up the mountain any longer. He had to make sure his family was safe. The long walk up the near vertical path tired him out, as it always did when he visited. He’d become accustomed to the thicker air of the plains. When he was younger, he had run up this path. Every time he glanced down at the Indus it grew smaller, until it looked like a light blue ribbon lying at the foot of the mountain.

When he finally reached Nadeem’s land, a wave of nausea washed over him. The house was gone—there was just a pile of stones and mud with a huge rock perched on top like some prehistoric predator. The house had been dry-stacked stone with mud plaster and a wooden frame; it wouldn’t have taken much to destroy it.

He could smell the carcass of the ram from ten paces, and saw that the birds and wild dogs had been busy. How the children had loved that animal. Razaq had even made a leather bridle for it.

He wandered onto the terraced farmland and found the grave under the trees. He kneeled beside it. Whose was it? It was new and, in Muslim fashion, had no marker. It was an adult grave: Nadeem’s or Zarina’s? He wished he could find out, but nothing would induce him to desecrate a grave. A family member must have dug it, so surely someone in his family was alive.

He sat by the grave for an hour, then said his prayers. He walked across to the pile of rubble that had been the house. Had they run out as soon as they felt the earth trembling? He sat on Nadeem’s charpoy and stared at the scene before him. Something glinted in the sunlight filtering through the trees, something red near the rubble. When he rose to check, he found it was red glass, a tiny broken bangle. That was when the tears finally came. He sank to his knees in the stones and wept like a child.

Razaq was woken in the morning by a thumping sound. He opened one eye to see a boy a little younger than himself squatting on the ground and grinding spices by banging a wooden pestle into a narrow wooden bowl. His mother used a wooden pestle like that to crush coriander seeds, cumin, and cardamom. She crushed ginger and garlic in it, too. Razaq rolled over and groaned. His back felt like he had been roped between two buffaloes turning a waterwheel in opposite directions.

The other boy turned; this must be Aslam. “So you wake at last. It is midday.” He was pinched in the face with a haunted look. Razaq thought his eyes were those of a hunted wolf in the forest. The boy glanced nervously out to the eating area. “You had better get some naan soon.”

Razaq went outside to pee in a drain. The smells of the curry the other boy was cooking made his stomach rumble. When he came back in, the boy gave him a chapatti and a bowl of leftover curry. In it was floating one piece of bone with a few tufts of meat clinging to it. It had more chili than Razaq was used to, but he guessed it was all he would get. He pushed it down while Aslam told him where to go to buy the bread for customers.

He raced out, dodged buses, dogs, bicycles, and travelers with their bags. The boy cooking the naan at the tandoor oven was older than he was, more like Hussain’s age. “Haven’t seen you before,” he said. “You new around here?”

Razaq nodded. “I work for Kazim.”

The boy didn’t reply at first; he was concentrating on getting the bread out of the clay tandoor with his long hooked rod. “Kazim with the teashop?” he finally asked.

“It is called a restaurant,” Razaq said.

“I suppose that’s possible,” said the boy as he wrapped the bread in newspaper. “Watch your back, that’s all I can say.”

The warm smell of the risen bread made Razaq feel hungry. He had only eaten naan a few times at weddings in the village. It had been very tasty as he remembered. Next time, he would take some of his father’s money and buy himself one. Maybe it wouldn’t matter that it was Ramadan—the bus terminal seemed to be exempt from the fast: he could see men eating as they walked to the buses.

Back in the kitchen, he checked Aslam wasn’t watching and took out his father’s purse. He fingered the paper notes. He had never had money of his own. Sometimes they swapped milk for eggs with Ardil’s family if the chickens weren’t laying, or apricots for grapes, but there was never an exchange of money. His father grew small crops of rice and wheat or corn. They had only just harvested the corn before the earthquake, and they hadn’t yet separated their own needs from what they would give to the khan. It had all been lost. And Peepu, the animals. He tried to keep his mind away from his mother and sisters, the image of his father’s body. He put five rupees in his pocket, then he hid the purse under his blanket.

The second time that day he was sent to the tandoor oven, he was on his way back, finishing his own naan and feeling almost happy, when he passed a bus. A boy was cleaning the windows—without any energy, Razaq noticed. Just then the driver jumped out of the door. It was the man called Saleem who had brought them down from the mountains. He grabbed Razaq by the arm and hustled him between two buildings, not far from Kazim’s restaurant. He turned Razaq to face him.

Razaq bit his lip. “What do you want?”

Saleem half-laughed, his face close to Razaq’s. “You are like a mountain wolf, so strong and proud.”

Razaq leaned backward. No one had said anything like that to him before, and he didn’t like the look in Saleem’s eyes. He looked as if he was going to eat him.

“Come now,” Saleem’s voice wheedled. “It won’t take long. I haven’t been home for a week. I’ll pay you twenty rupees.”

Razaq was confused. Twenty rupees sounded good, but what did he have to do? Give him the naan? It had cost fifteen. He’d be five ahead. Razaq slowly held the bread out toward Saleem.

The look in the man’s eyes changed. “Bebekoof, you idiot,” and he grabbed Razaq and spun him around in one movement and shoved him up against the wall. The naan fell to the ground as Saleem fumbled with his shalwar cord with one hand. Suddenly, Razaq understood.

“No.” He twisted to smash out with his fist. “Leave me alone.”

He managed to hit Saleem’s chin, but Saleem banged his face into the wall and held him there with one arm. Razaq’s head spun; he couldn’t escape Saleem’s grasp, however much he squirmed. He felt the man’s body behind him, thrusting to get closer, one hand pushing up his shirt. He tried to kick with his foot, but Saleem had thought of that, too. Razaq was firmly held. Would anyone care if he shouted again?

Suddenly, there was a curse, another voice. “Stop!”

Saleem let Razaq go, and he fell. He scrambled backward out of the way.

“Badmarsh!” It was Kazim and he held a broom. He whacked Saleem over the head with it.

“Stop hitting me, you old devil. I wouldn’t hurt him. I just wanted some fun.”

“Not with him you can’t.”

“I didn’t know he was yours. Put that broom down!”

Razaq hastily picked up the bread; it was still wrapped in the newspaper. He brushed off the dust and stood near Kazim.

Kazim lowered the broom and Saleem sneered at him. “What do you want with him anyway? You couldn’t make your pizzle stand up straight with string.”

Kazim’s face darkened. “Don’t touch him again, sunno? Do you hear?”

“Ji, you stupid bastard.” Saleem stomped off to his bus.

Razaq regarded Kazim tentatively. “Shukriya, thank you,” he said, but there was no sympathy from Kazim. He smacked Razaq’s ear with his open hand.

“What do you think you’re doing going down a deserted gali with him?”

“I didn’t know.”

Kazim stared at Razaq. Then he said, “What are these crumbs on your mouth? You’ve been eating my naan?”

“Nay, janab, I bought one myself.”

Kazim narrowed his eyes. His stillness was more frightening than the beating. For a moment, Razaq thought he was in trouble for eating during Ramadan. Then Kazim said quietly, “You have money? Where did you get it?”

“My father.”

“Your father?” Kazim relaxed slightly. “Show me.” Razaq took the few rupees from his pocket. Kazim scooped them up. “You don’t need this. From now on, I provide for your every need. This will help pay off the exorbitant price I paid for you.”

“But—”

“You have too much to say for yourself.”

Razaq didn’t agree; he hadn’t said much at all. His father always told him that none should lord it over another—except the khans, of course, but that was different. They were the ruling barons who owned the land and kept everyone safe, but as far as he knew, they didn’t keep slaves. And that’s what this felt like.

“Get inside. And next time,” Kazim grabbed Razaq’s arm, “next time dodge the drivers. They’re as randy as dogs and will stick their banana in any hole they see.” He gave Razaq a push.

Razaq took the naan into the eating room and laid it on the tables for the customers to eat. The TV was on, and he was beginning to recognize a few actors. The famous Amir Khan was fighting a secret agent in the Kashmiri snow. He noticed a few men stared at him as he watched the screen, until Kazim sent him off to help Aslam.