The girl next door

COVER STORY

Some nights I wake up screaming into my pillow. Other nights, I don’t go to sleep at all. I stare silently at the granite grey roof of my one-room flat in one of Islamabad’s less prosperous sectors, listening to the couple living in the flat beside mine hurl accusations and various items of crockery at each other.

I have not slept peacefully in a long time. The four years in jail and the events preceding them, dubbed by the newspapers as the 16-year-old boy arrested for attempted murder of employer’s wife, don’t let me sleep. The iron bars of the jail crop up between my eyelids, refusing to let them shut. The headline dances a ballet inside my brain, its feet stamping around in my head until I feel like banging it against a wall.

The day I first see her, my neighbours have engaged themselves in a very physical argument. Among the various crashes and smashes coming from their flat, her soft knock goes unheard.

Staring at the roof, I believe that her whispered ‘Mister Number 18? Are you in there?’ is imaginary, and only when she opens the door slightly to peek in do I realize that the little girl from next door is standing outside my room at 12 in the night.

I sit up quickly, wondering what on earth I have done to make her think she can come here at this ungodly hour. We stare at each other for a few minutes, which is time enough for me to observe her thoroughly.

She is very young, no more than seven. Her hair is black and curly, uncombed at night it looks like a tangle of kudzu on her head. Her features are very common, her skin a light shade of brown, reminding me of the cheap milky coffee served at the little restaurant where I work. Her eyes are so big that I can almost see, in the dim light from the bulb hanging outside, the reflection of my room in them, and they are odd; one is a light grass green, the other a faded blue.

“Mister Number 18?” she whispers loudly. “Are you awake?”

The question is unnecessary, but I nod nevertheless.

She creeps into the room and climbs onto my charpoy, closing the door behind her softly. I edge away from her unconsciously, feeling extremely uncomfortable. I want to ask her if I can help her in any way, but she doesn’t wait for me to ask her anything. Slipping under the coarse white sheet I use to cover myself while sleeping, she wraps her arms around my pillow and closes her eyes.

In the dim light of the room, I watch her forehead wrinkle slightly and understand at once that she is listening to the couple next door fight.

“We are Number 19, you know.” She mumbles sleepily and I realize they are her parents.

I watch the little girl listen to her parents, and then I get up and lie down on the floor, using my arms as pillows. Her steady breathing fills the room in a few minutes. I spend the entire night listening to her parents fight each other over her school bag, the zip of which was broken accidentally by her father in the evening.

The next morning, I wake up from an uneasy sleep to find the child gone.

I see her at Nazri’s tuck-shop shop with other children while I am walking to work. Her head is wrapped in a little white scarf, she is standing By now I know the routine of most of the tenants in this building, and the little shops surrounding it. Around seven in the morning every day, women send their children to school. They can be seen chasing after their offspring to hand them their deliberately forgotten snack boxes, while men cycle to work as the shop owners stretch behind counters, waiting for their first customers. Nazri I have seen many times; a fat, jolly old man with a Sindhi topi clamped on his head. He has big, bulging eyes that he is in the habit of blinking rapidly behind his glasses. He often gives away yesterday’s leftover candies to the children passing by for school every morning. I see the little girl next door chatting away as Nazri fills her plastic pencil-box with one-rupee candies, grinning at her chatter.

As I serve the customers that day with steaming tikkas and crunchy chapattis, I think about the girl next door, or as I should be calling her, Miss Number 19.

That evening, when I return from work, I see her on the street, trailing behind her lanky father who is going from shop to shop, lounging at every counter for idle talk with other men from around the street.

I sit down outside the little dhaba that serves tea and naan. As I sip the scorching chaye, I watch the girl next door as she first tags along behind her father, and then, when he shoos her away, amuses herself by making shapes on the dusty pavement. She is soon joined by a few other children.

“Beautiful child, isn’t she?” I look up, startled. Nazri sits down heavily beside me, letting out a groan. “God, I’m getting old!”

“You’ve got a few years in you yet.” I smile slightly. I don’t have many acquaintances in Islamabad and not one friend, but Nazri is the sort of man who makes you know him and imposes his acquaintance on you and it isn’t even slightly bothersome.

“Few years, mian?” he squints at me. “My taya was a pehalwan and he died at fifty seven! I’m fifty five and I don’t call myself a pehalwan, no sir!”

I shrug slightly, dipping a piece of naan into my tea.

“Taya ji died very quietly, you know. Went to sleep on a Friday afternoon, never woke up.” Nazri heaves a long sigh. “Bass ji. Rahey naam Allah ka.”

That night, the girl next door knocks on my door again. She creeps in just as the sound of her father throwing a plate in her flat shakes the room. Wordlessly, I lie down on the floor, she crawls under the covers of the charpoy and we are asleep within an hour.

In the morning when I wake, she has already left.

I learn, during the next few days, from eavesdropping at her home constantly and consciously, that her name is Maryam. She is seven years old. Her father is a shopkeeper in Jum’a bazaar and her mother, a housewife. They hate each other and the only reason they do not divorce each other is because neither could ever find a better punching bag than their current spouse.

Every night, regular as clockwork, their argument starts when the father finishes his supper. Every day, it is about something different from yesterday.

I hear Maryam being put to bed, and her mother ask, in a low voice that is not low enough, “Kitney pesey ho gaye aaj?” (how much money did you make today?)

The words are a cue. Her father begins by cursing his wife for giving birth to only one child and a daughter at that and ends with cursing a past president for hanging Bhutto. “He took away any roti, kapra aur makaan us poor folk might have been about to receive.”

The mother who took the curses thrown at herself and her daughter passively, flares up, as she believes the late dictator was the only pious leader the country ever had.

“Had my parhezgaar (righteous) father known what a kafir (non-believer) he was marrying me to, he would have kept me in his house forever instead of giving me to you.” She snarls.

“Listen to her.” The father chuckles. “Kafir? It is this kafir income that is feeding you!”

Enraged, the wife reminds him that he has not given her a penny since last month. He, in response, reminds her of how he is not getting many customers lately, as the birth of a daughter is bad luck. My father had me, the mother yells in answer, and he had a thriving shop.

“Your father sold niswar and gutka, oye.” The husband answers. “And what luck? You are banjh (Barren).” I flinch every time he says the word. A cold voice, the word delivered at a pitch slightly lower than the rest of the sentence.

The next minute, as the wife crosses the room to hurl something at the husband and he prepares to retaliate, there is the soft knock at my door and the question comes in its shadow. “Mister Number 18, are you awake?”

I do not realize that in slipping down to the floor and understanding the unspoken pact of silence during daytime about her sanctuary, I gain a place in Maryam’s life I never wanted and am in no way fit to have.

It is a cold night, the December of 2008, when I first apprehend the fact that Maryam has turned me into her guardian angel.

It has been a month and a half since I moved to Islamabad from Lahore, never trying to find my family or contact them after my release from jail.

I am walking silently down the street as dusk falls swiftly, the street lit by the bulbs hanging in the shops along one side. The wind tosses a newspaper around the street, its papers rustling and crackling in protest.

Twenty year old man released from jail after employer and wife pardon him for attempted murder. The headline sidles onto the street and starts walking beside me, a snide look on its face.

I remember the courtroom applauding collectively as she sat back on her seat beside her husband, the dupatta sliding off her silky brown hair, curled fashionably. Her large brown eyes swept my way, crinkled at the corners by her warm smile and look away. My government-assigned lawyer places a restraining hand on my shoulder and enraged, I stare at the floor.

“Maryam, leave her hand or I am going to break your bloody arm.”

I stop at the corner of the street. They are standing near the entrance of the dusty playing ground, where the grass is dead in the places where motorcyclists drive through it regularly to reach the next sector through a shortcut. Maryam is dressed in a beautiful little blue frock, her hair combed neatly and pulled back in a matching headband.

With a sting of pity, I realize she is dressed to go outside. They have brought her out to play in the park - had, before falling back to their warm familial instincts.

“Leave her, I say.” Her father shakes her shoulder furiously. Whimpering, the child clings to her mother’s arm even more tightly. The mother looks gloatingly at the father, wrapping her chadar around herself, so that Maryam is hidden under it.

“Maryam is going to Nani Amma’s with me, hein na, beta?” her mother makes a cooing puch-puch with her mouth that seems to scare the girl even more. From under the chadar, she says shrilly.

“Amma, ghar chalo naa baba sath.” (Mom, let’s go home with Baba.)

The father grabs at her under the chadar, pulling her away from his wife.

“Nahi jati tumhari maa apney ghar.” (Your mom is not coming with us) he growls. “You move. Come on. I haven’t got all day.”

“Baba ji, please naa..” Maryam whimpers as he drags her towards our street. Her mother grabs the arm swinging free by her side.

“Chorein issay. (Leave her) Maryam wants to go with her Amma.”

The child is suspended between the two like an oddly realistic cornhusk doll, her toes barely touching the pavement on which they stand. I am the only passerby watching the little family steadily. Everyone else ignores them completely after a pause and a knowing smile which seems to bother only the child.

Maryam looks around helplessly and her eyes find me. There is a glimmer of hope in the pair of green and blue when she sees me. They light up like two glass lanterns. Her mouth opens in an expectant smile. I hold her eyes for a second in my black ones before stepping back into the darkness of the shadow of the wall behind me. Maryam’s smile disappears instantly. She watches, dumb, as I turn my face away, my movements somehow slower than usual. I walk down the street, staring mulishly at my shoes. Behind me, I hear the parents pull and push the child, but she doesn’t whimper again. I can feel her stupefied, green-blue gaze boring into the back of my jacket.

To be continued ...