Moth Smoke

13 seven

My cocoon is too tight. Uncontained by my broken body, blood and wet flesh combine with cloth, bonding me to my bandages. Eyes shut by swelling see only orange, translucent light.

Wrapped inside my painkillers and the shell of my scars and bruises like a slow-growing larva, I wait.

She comes in with her palms pressed together, fingers touching lips, wide eyes above a prayer or a shush so forceful it requires both hands.

‘What happened to you?’

‘Don’t ask.’ The words whistle through the gap in my teeth, tickling the raw hole in my gum.

She takes my good hand in both of hers and strokes it with her cheek, runs her fingers over my face, over my bruises, my cuts, the train tracks of my stitches.

‘Who did this?’

I shut my eyes and reenter the dizziness that spins inside my head like two drinks too many too fast too strong. I can’t vomit it out. I’ve tried. I can only hold on to myself in the whirlwind, staring up at Shuja’s father, crying, begging. The barrel of his shotgun pressing against my abdomen like a needle, suddenly sharp. Gasping as my skin rips, as the needle slides into my body, pushing muscle and tissue aside, tearing through me, snapping my back, pinning me to the ground, mounting me like an insect on a board. And the nausea grows stronger, pulling me into itself, twisting me, wrenching at my guts, becoming unbearable.

I open my eyes. I want to kill him.

She sits down on the bed beside me.

I protect my rib cage with my arm.

‘Where’s your family?’ she asks.

‘I haven’t told them.’ I don’t want to explain, don’t want to see them until I’ve recovered and there’s no reason for questions. But that won’t happen, not in a lifetime, not with a dead finger and a crushed nose and a smile that can’t hide the darkness inside my head.

‘How will you pay for this?’

‘I don’t know.’

She slips her arm around my shoulders and cradles my head against her breast.

We breathe together. Slowly.

Time passes, flowing, a long, less and less painful sigh. And I shut my eyes.

Pain becomes only physical again.

Fear recedes.

Anger flickers for a moment longer, gas in the pipes after the stove has been turned off.

She says, ‘I’ll take care of you.’

And I feel gratitude and happiness rise up inside me: old friends, long-forgotten and yet much missed.

When the doctors tell me I can leave, she drives me home in my car. Its windows have been smashed, even the little triangles above the rear doors, but when the engine comes to life I smile, feeling unfamiliar muscles in my face flex.

In my room she lays me down on my bed, pulls the curtains shut, and undresses me.

Then she finds a bucket of cool water and a soft cloth and a bar of Pears soap. And she bathes me.

She begins with my eyes, stroking them shut. She follows my throat down to my collarbone, to the inside of my arm, to the skin between my fingers. To my chest, avoiding my broken rib, to my stomach, the bones of my pelvis. My feet, my shins. My thighs.

Then I feel her mouth and I exhale, slowly.

And after, she takes off her clothes and bathes herself. Touches herself. And then she lies beside me and watches me sleep.

When she leaves I’m alone. Completely alone. I’d hoped Manucci might be there, but he hasn’t come back. It frightens me to look at myself, and it frightens me even more to run my good hand along the broken rib curving around my soft innards, a gap in my body’s protection more shocking than the gap in my teeth.

That night I lie on my bed with my badminton racquet, tapping moths ineffectively, because it hurts too much when I move fast enough to kill them.

It’s more difficult to bear the pain when I’m alone. I know it’s good for me, a sign of life reasserting itself after the damage I’ve sustained, but it’s hard to put up with when there’s no one watching, no reference point, no sign that the struggle will lead anywhere but to more struggle. I can smile as a doctor sews stitches into my skin or a nurse slides a needle into my rump, but who can smile at a headache as he lies in bed in an empty house? I can’t. I haven’t that much strength.

The pain gets worse as the night goes on. The painkillers help, and the joints help as well, but what helps most is the heroin.

I find the stuff in my bedside table drawer, where it’s been lying untouched since the night of my first try, and I know from the second I see it that I want some. It’s wonderful. It doesn’t kill the pain exactly, but after an aitch the pain doesn’t seem to matter. Pain without hurt, as though I don’t understand what my nerves are telling me. Or don’t believe them.

I tell myself not to use it again, unless I really need the release. Hairy’s serious, after all. Wouldn’t want to get in the habit.

Mumtaz comes in the morning with halva poori for breakfast. Feeds me with her own hands, the halva still hot. Kisses the crumbs from my lips. And she brings me lunch and dinner: omelets and parathas, wrapped in greasy newspaper. Also candles. Matches. Mangoes. Toothpaste.

I don’t tell her about the hairy.

When I look in the mirror, when I see what’s been done to me, rage lifts my eyelids and twists my reflection. I cherish the anger, center myself in it, draw power from it, strength for my healing. Because I will heal. And then it’ll be my turn at the crease. And I won’t be gentle with my bat.

She understands how I feel. Knows how to calm me.

When I tell her how my body was broken, fury comes, and I start screaming until I exhaust myself, panting from the pain in my rib cage. She wipes the spit from my chin and cradles my head, somehow corking my anger, bottling it up. And after a while I do feel better. Bottled, starved for air, even anger can’t burn.

The longer she stays, the more I hate it when she leaves.

One evening she says, ‘You look less monstrous every day.’

‘So do you.’

‘How do you feel?’

‘Stronger.’

‘Good, because Ozi’s back. I won’t be able to come as often.’

I’m silent.

‘You look disappointed,’ she says.

‘I am.’

‘Well, I can’t blame you. I wouldn’t mind being fed and bathed by you every day, either.’

‘It’s not that. I want to see you.’

‘I’m here.’

‘I want to see you as much as Ozi sees you.’

‘I’m best in small doses, believe me.’

My rib twinges, but she slides her hand under my shirt and onto my chest, and then I must breathe more softly, because I can’t feel the pain.

We lie naked in bed, a small chocolate cake with a red-and-white sparkling candle balanced between my nipples, fizzing and smoking merrily. Two weeks out of hospital. Two months without electricity. Three months since I lost my job. Twenty-nine years since my first smack on the bottom, the first time I cried.

Today is my birthday. My family has already been by, honking at the gate until the neighbors started shouting and they had to go away. I’m not ready to face them yet. And I wanted to be alone with Mumtaz. She tells me to make a wish. I wish for work and money and air-conditioning and a healed rib and a new tooth and ten good fingers and my ex-best friend’s wife. Then I blow out the candle. It takes two tries, and makes me wince.

‘Don’t tell me what you wished for,’ she says.

‘It would take too long,’ I say. And I grin, because at this moment, with her beside me and an undisturbed afternoon ahead, I feel almost happy.

She takes the plate off my chest and strokes my hair.

I shut my eyes. ‘What would you wish for?’ I ask.

She thinks. ‘Perfect foresight, a little courage, and a time machine.’

I smile. I like the slow rasp of her voice, the way she draws out her words. ‘Why?’

‘So I could go four years back into the past, realize what was going to happen if I married Ozi, and say no when he asked.’

My head begins to throb, full of blood, stuffed by the excited pumping of my heart. I open my eyes. ‘So it was a mistake?’

She turns onto her side. Her breast brushes my shoulder. ‘I have no clothes on. I’m with you. You’re not my husband. I’ve clearly made a mistake somewhere.’

‘Did you ever love him?’

She nods. ‘I loved him. Did you?’

‘I think so.’

‘So what happened?’

Something is caught between my teeth. I pull it out: a hair. Maybe an eyelash. ‘I don’t know. A million things. There were problems even when we were kids. He was vicious, full of himself. And when he left, we drifted apart. Maybe I just realized what he was all along: not a good guy. A bastard, really. A self-centered, two-faced, spoiled little bastard …’

‘Stop.’

The sharpness of her tone makes me realize I’m getting carried away, and I bite down on my words. But I feel myself choking on all I’m leaving unsaid.

‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to lie here and attack Ozi. It isn’t right.’

‘You said it was a mistake to marry him.’

‘For me, yes. But which one of us is the problem? Ozi’s a good father. He’s sweet. He’s generous. He’s smart …’

I feel the muscles in my chest contract. ‘He’s rich. He’s got everything he wants. He’s perfect.’

She pulls back. ‘Why are you so bitter?’

‘He’s a bastard.’

‘There’s no reason for you to be jealous.’

My mouth is wet with unswallowed spit. ‘If you think he’s so wonderful, maybe you shouldn’t be here.’

She watches me, her eyebrows rising, wrinkling her forehead. ‘Are you serious?’

I realize she’s getting angry. And I don’t want to fight. ‘No,’ I say. And when she doesn’t respond, I add, ‘I’m sorry.’

She’s quiet for a moment. ‘I don’t think I should be married to Ozi. But not because of him. Because of me. I’m really not all that nice. I don’t think I’m the sort who should marry at all.’

‘That isn’t true.’

She smiles. ‘You don’t know me that well. I’m a bad wife. And I’m a worse mother.’

I put my arm around her and she presses against my side. ‘You’re just stuck in a bad situation.’

She shakes her head. ‘I chose my situation. No, it’s deeper than that.’

‘What is?’

‘Where am I right now?’

I stroke her back. ‘With me.’

‘And what about my son? He’s at home. He misses me. But I leave him with Pilar as much as I can. I can’t help it. I’m flawed. A bad design.’

‘It’s normal. Everyone gets tired of their children sometimes.’

‘I’m not talking about getting tired sometimes. I don’t know. I don’t think I can explain it.’

‘My mother didn’t spend every minute with me.’

‘No?’ Her belly swells against my side with her breathing.

‘Of course not. She worked, for one thing. And I went to school during the day, sports in the afternoons. And at night I went out with my friends.’

‘But when you were home together?’

I think of my mother and feel myself starting to slip, a sudden weightlessness, the dip in my stomach as a car crests a hill, fast, the uncertainty that entered my life the day she died. I pull Mumtaz to me. ‘We used to talk. We were close.’

‘You see. I hear it in your voice. Muazzam is never going to speak of me that way.’

‘You don’t know that.’ I kiss her, softly. ‘You’re wonderful. You make me feel completely cared for.’

She stops breathing and stares at me for a moment, almost a glare. I pause. Then it passes. Her body relaxes, her waist sinking deeper into the bed, the curve from her shoulder to her hip becoming more pronounced.

‘Maybe that’s why I’m here,’ she says. She doesn’t smile, but she kisses me back, and both of us shut our eyes.

Sometimes when Mumtaz is with me, moving about the house, I watch her. I’m mesmerized by her posture. She stands with strength and poise and supple flexibility, like a village woman balancing a pitcher of water on her head as she walks home from the well. Shoulder blades pulled back. Chin up.

The muscles of her neck flare, taut when she turns, when she inhales before speaking.

She has the long torso of Sadequain’s imagination. And solid, strong legs. One half slender, one half less so. A mermaid.

Her breasts are small and wonderfully round. One hangs half a rib lower.

Her fingers are thin. Nails short, unpolished. Veins raise the smooth skin of her hands before subsiding into her forearms. Roots feeding blood to her grip.

She curls and uncurls her toes without thinking when she sits.

And her mouth is wide and alive.

I commit her to memory.

When I’m alone, I feel a strange yearning, the hunger of a man fasting not because he believes but because he’s ashamed. Not the cleansing hunger of the devout, but the feverish hunger of the hypocrite. I let her go every evening only because there’s nothing I can do to stop her.

And I ask myself what it is about me that makes this wonderful, beautiful woman return. Is it just because I’m pathetic, helpless in my current state, completely dependent on her? Or is it my sense of humor, my willingness to tease her, to joke my way into painful, secret places? Do I help her understand herself? Do I make her happy? Do I do something for her that her husband and son can’t do?

Has she fallen in love with me?

As the days pass and I continue to heal, my body knitting itself back together, I begin to allow myself to think that maybe she has.

And one day, after many joints, as we lie replete in bed, as I play with her hair and she kisses my hand, I realize that she watches me. That she touches me not just with tenderness but with fascination.

And my mind starts to whirl.

Suddenly I think I’m about to understand.

She’s drawn to me just as I’m drawn to her. She can’t keep away. She circles, forced to keep her distance, afraid of abandoning her husband and, even more, her son for too long. But she keeps coming, like a moth to my candle, staying longer than she should, leaving late for dinners and birthday parties, singeing her wings. She’s risking her marriage for me, her family, her reputation.

And I, the moth circling her candle, realize that she’s not just a candle. She’s a moth as well, circling me. I look at her and see myself reflected, my feelings, my desires. And she, looking at me, must see herself. And which of us is moth and which is candle hardly seems to matter. We’re both the same.

That’s the secret.

What moths never tell us as they whirl in their dances.

What Manucci learned at Pak Tea House.

What sufis veil in verse.

I turn her around and look into her eyes and see the wonder in them that must be in mine as well, the wonder I first saw on our night of ecstasy, and I feel myself explode, expand, fill the universe, then collapse, implode like a detonation under water, become tiny, disappear.

I’m hardly aware of myself, of her, when I open my mouth. There is just us, and I speak for us when I speak, and I must be trembling and crying, but I don’t even know if I am or what I’m doing.

I just say it.

‘I love you.’

And I lose myself in her eyes and we kiss and I feel myself becoming part of something new, something larger, something I never knew could be.

Union.

There are no words.

But after.

‘Don’t say that,’ she says.

And faintly, the smell of something burning.

When I wake, it seems a little less hot than usual, so I’m worried I have a fever until light flashes behind the curtains and the sound of a detonation rolls in with a force that makes the windows rattle. As I step outside with a plastic bag over my cast, a stiff breeze pulls my hair away from my face, and I see the pregnant clouds of the monsoon hanging low over the city.

The rains have finally decided to come.

I sit down on the lawn, resting my back against the wall of the house, and light an aitch I’ve waited a long time to smoke. Suddenly the air is still and the trees are silent, and I can hear laughter from my neighbor’s servant quarters. A bicycle bell sounds in the street, reminding me of the green Sohrab I had as a child. Then the wind returns, bringing the smell of wet soil and a pair of orange parrots that swoop down to take shelter in the lower branches of the banyan tree, where they glow in the shadows.

A raindrop strikes the lawn, sending up a tiny plume of dust. Others follow, a barrage of dusty explosions bursting all around me. The leaves of the banyan tree rebound from their impact. The parrots disappear from sight. In the distance, the clouds seem to reach down to touch the earth. And then a curtain of water falls quietly and shatters across the city with a terrifying roar, drenching me instantly. I hear the hot concrete of the driveway hissing, turning rain back into steam, and I smell the dead grass that lies under the dirt of the lawn.

I fill my mouth with water, gritty at first, then pure and clean, and roll into a ball with my face pressed against my knees, sucking on a hailstone, shivering as wet cloth sticks to my body. Heavy drops beat their beat on my back and I rock slowly, my thoughts silenced by the violence of the storm, gasping in the sudden, unexpected cold.

The parrots the monsoon brought to my banyan tree have decided to stay awhile. There’s been a break in the downpour today, and I can see them from my window, swimming in and out of the green reef of the canopy like tropical fish, blazing with color when the sun winks at them through the occasional gap between storm clouds.

Along with parrots, the rains have brought flooding to the Punjab and a crime wave to Lahore. Heists and holdups and the odd bombing compete with aerial food drops and humanitarian heroics for headline space on the front pages of the newspapers. Looking out on the soggy city, I pretend to move my hand through a table-tennis shot, but I’m really reenacting the slap that sent Manucci away, wondering how a little twist of the wrist could have such enormous consequences.

What am I going to do? I don’t know how to cook or clean or do the wash. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to learn. The only people in my neighborhood who don’t have servants are servants themselves. Except for me. And I refuse to serve. I’m done with giving. Giving service to bank clients, giving respect to people who haven’t earned it, giving hash and getting punished. I’m ready to take.

‘What are you looking at?’ she asks me.

‘Parrots,’ I tell her.

She gets out of bed, picks up my jeans, and puts them on, rolling the waistband down so they don’t fall off her hips. ‘Do you have a shirt I can wear?’ she asks me.

‘Nothing clean,’ I answer.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

I take a white undershirt out of my closet and sniff it. Smells neutral enough. She puts it on and walks out of the room, her bare feet avoiding the dead moths and the puddles near the windows.

‘You need a replacement for Manucci,’ she says.

‘I can’t afford one,’ I reply, following her.

She sees what she’s looking for, a box of matches, and lights her cigarette. Then she sits down on the couch and pulls her legs under her. ‘I’m going to give you some money until you find work.’

I sit down next to her and shake my head. ‘I don’t want any more of Ozi’s money, thanks.’

She kisses me. ‘Well, once you’ve started having an affair with his wife, taking his money doesn’t seem like such a big step.’

I rub the corner of her jaw with my chin, feel my stubble scratch her skin, turn it red. ‘I don’t want to be having an affair with his wife.’

She smiles. ‘Tired of me so soon?’

‘I’m serious.’

She shakes her head and looks away. Her hair covers the patch of redness. ‘Don’t do this.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t make this into something it isn’t.’

‘What isn’t this?’

‘This isn’t a courtship.’

I tug at the bottom of her undershirt. My undershirt, on her. It’s old, the cotton very soft, fraying slightly around the collar. ‘This isn’t just sex.’

She turns and looks at me. One hand covers mine, stops my tugging. ‘Nothing is just sex. I care about you. I need this right now.’

‘I love you.’

‘Stop saying that.’

I pull on her shirt again, gently. ‘Do you think you can go back to Ozi as though nothing ever happened?’

‘Daru, I don’t have to go back to him. I’m married to him. I’d have to leave him to go back to him.’

‘But you started this.’

She takes my hand off her shirt. ‘You didn’t exactly resist.’

‘But you’re the one who made it happen.’

‘I just got over my guilt first.’

‘So why hold back now?’

‘Daru, I’m married. I have a son. I’m not looking to mate. I’m looking to be with a man for me, because it makes me happy.’

‘And I don’t make you happy?’

‘You do.’

‘But you don’t care about my happiness.’

‘Of course I do. That’s why I’m being honest with you. If you’re looking for a wife, you need to look somewhere else. I’m an awful wife. And I’m already married.’

I walk over to a cabinet and take out the hairy. I haven’t told Mumtaz I’ve been smoking the stuff. But suddenly I see no reason to hide. Let her be angry.

Then again, maybe she won’t even care. I’m just her lover, after all.

I light up and she asks for a puff.

‘No,’ I say.

She stays seated, hugging her knees on the sofa. ‘Why not?’

I pull the smoke into my lungs, growing calm before the aitch has even begun to work: the relaxation of anticipation. ‘You don’t want it.’

‘Are you angry?’ Her tone is neutral, neither cold, accusatory, nor warm, inviting reconciliation.

‘It’s an aitch.’

‘Aitch?’

‘Aitch. Hairy. Heroin. Bad for your health.’

She’s quiet. I don’t feel any need to say more. I like this, the sense that she’s trying to communicate with me while I hold back, waiting.

‘You’re more stupid than you look,’ she says.

I ignore her. The aitch is almost gone. I hold it between thumb and forefinger, fill my chest with a last puff.

‘Are you such a coward?’ she snaps. ‘Have you really just given up on everything?’

‘Don’t overreact. I’ve had some occasionally. Twice or thrice.’ I’m acting cool, but inwardly I’m overjoyed by her reaction. She’s furious. Which means she’s concerned.

She glares at me. ‘You have to stop it.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t be an idiot. It’s heroin. It isn’t hash or ex. It isn’t a nice little recreational drug.’

‘It depends on how much you have. I’m a recreational user.’

‘Do you think you can quit?’

‘I’m not hooked. How about you?’

She’s touching her chin with her finger. ‘How about me?’

‘Do you think you can quit?’

She shakes her head and gives me a frustrated smile. ‘I don’t smoke heroin, you maniac.’

‘Quit Ozi. He’s bad for you. You’re unhappy.’

She looks at me, still shaking her head. Then she lights a cigarette. ‘Let’s not confuse things. Your doing heroin has nothing to do with my marriage.’

‘You’re here every day. Why don’t you leave him?’

‘I have a son, in case you’ve forgotten.’

With the heroin comes clarity. And a certain cruelty, a calm disregard for consequences. ‘You don’t give a shit about your son.’

She stops smoking. ‘Don’t say that,’ she says in a low voice.

‘You don’t love him. Stop pretending.’

She drops her cigarette on the floor. ‘I’m leaving.’

‘You run away from him every chance you get. Do you think it’s good for him that you stay? He’s going to grow up wondering why his mother never really talks to him, why she’s always so distant. And do you know what that’s going to do to him? He’ll be miserable.’

She stares at me, eyes wet, face hard. ‘You’re a bastard.’

‘Quit them,’ I say. ‘It’s for the best.’

She stands, wipes her tears.

I reach out, but she slaps my hand away. Pain slices up from my finger.

‘I don’t love you,’ she says. ‘And the reason you’re so desperate to think you’re in love with me is because your life is going nowhere and you know it.’

With the pain in my hand comes unexpected, ferocious anger. But even more than anger, I feel triumph straighten my back and flush my face, triumph because I know I’m right about her, because she’d never be so vicious if I were wrong.

She holds out a note. ‘Here’s a thousand. You’ll need it.’

‘I don’t want it.’

She walks into the bedroom, strips naked, puts on her clothes, and leaves without another word.

When she’s gone I pick up the clothes she was wearing and put them on. I can smell her in them, and I’m suddenly filled with the longing to speak with her.

Then I find the thousand-rupee note in my wallet.

I’m at once furious and ashamed, furious because people give money after sex to prostitutes and ashamed because I’m so hungry that I have to take it. But I make a decision. To hell with handouts. I’m ready for a little justice.

I’m driving slowly to Murad Badshah’s workshop, trying not to splash pedestrians wading through the flooded streets with their shoes in their hands and their shalwars pulled up their thighs, when I’m overtaken by a Land Cruiser that sprays muddy water in its wake like a speedboat and wets me through my open window. Bastard. I dry my face on my sleeve and clear the windshield with the wipers.

All my life the arrival of the monsoon has been a happy occasion, ending the heat of high summer and making Lahore green again. But this year I see it as a time of festering, not rebirth. Without air-conditioning, temperatures are still high enough for me to sweat as I lie on my bed trying to sleep, but now the sweat doesn’t evaporate. Instead, it coagulates like blood into peeled scabs of dampness that cover my itching body. Unrefrigerated, the food in my house spoils overnight, consumed by colored molds that spread like cancer. Overripe fruit bursts open, unhealthy flesh oozing out of ruptures in sickly skin. And the larvae already wriggling in dark pools of water will soon erupt into swarms of mosquitoes.

The entire city is uneasy. Sometimes, when monsoon lightning slips a bright explosion under the clouds, there is a pause in conversations. Teacups halt, steaming, in front of extended lips. Lightning’s echo comes as thunder. And the city waits for thunder’s echo, for a wall of heat that burns Lahore with the energy of a thousand summers, a million partitions, a billion atomic souls split in half.

Only after light’s echo has come as sound, after it is clear sound’s echo will fail to come as heat, do lips and teacups make contact, and even then minds and taste buds remain far apart.

It is, after all, our first nuclear monsoon. And I’m looking for a fat man.

I follow Ferozepur Road as it curves past Ichra, hoping as the water gets deeper that my car won’t stall. But soon I reach a point where most of the traffic is turning around and only the Bedford trucks and four-wheel drives are continuing on. Ahead, a few cars have foundered, their exhaust pipes submerged, and I doubt mine will do any better, so I park my car beside the road on a raised slope in front of a shop that sells toilet seats and bathroom tiles. With my shoes tied together by the laces and hanging from my neck, and my jeans rolled up to my knees, I head out on foot.

It takes me the better part of an hour to wade the mile or so to Murad Badshah’s workshop. He’s chatting with a mechanic, and their hands are stained with motor oil. ‘Hullo, old chap,’ he booms when he sees me. ‘This is a pleasant surprise.’

‘I thought we had an appointment,’ I reply, shaking his hand.

‘Yes, but I assumed it was canceled, force majeure and all that.’ He gestures in the direction of the street. ‘How did you make it here, by ship? I’m losing money every hour because this damned water has two of my rickshaws stranded.’ He tells the mechanic to take a break and offers me a stool next to a rickshaw lying on its side. ‘I tried to call you from the shop next door to tell you not to come, old boy, but no one answered at your end.’

‘My phone is dead,’ I tell him. ‘It must be the rains.’ Either that or I’ve finally been disconnected.

He smiles and strokes his chin, his stained fingers leaving streaks. ‘No job, no electricity, no telephone. Perhaps you ought to reconsider joining me in the entrepreneurial venture I mentioned before.’

I have reconsidered. That’s why I’m here. I only hope I’m not about to be disappointed. ‘I’m in no mood to be laughed at,’ I warn him.

His puffy eyes open wide. ‘I’m being serious.’

‘Tell me.’

Murad Badshah lights a cigarette and leans back on his stool like a child on a wooden horse. ‘A mechanic in my employ has a dimwitted cousin who managed to secure a position as a guard at a storage depot on Raiwind Road. In April of last year, during the flour shortage, a hungry mob attacked the depot. The guards shot three people dead. People were dying for their hunger, old boy, dying for their hunger. But there was no need for them to go hungry. My mechanic’s cousin told me, and I heard this with my own ears, mind you, that there was over a hundred tons of flour in that warehouse alone. Stockpiled, hoarded to keep up the prices.’

‘May I have a cigarette?’ I ask. ‘Mine seem to be soaked.’

‘There you are.’ He offers his pack and lights one for me.

‘So what does all this have to do with your plan?’

‘Just laying the intellectual foundation, old boy,’ Murad Badshah tells me. ‘This is how I see things. People are fed up with subsisting on the droppings of the rich. The time is ripe for a revolution. The rich use Kalashnikovs to persuade tenant farmers and factory laborers and the rest of us to stay in line.’ He reaches under his kurta and pulls out the revolver I’ve seen once before. ‘But we, too, can be persuasive.’

‘Let me see it,’ I say, and he hands it to me. It feels cool against my cheek, soothing, like a wet compress on a feverish forehead. I sight along the barrel, pleased that I hold it rock steady, without the slightest trembling. ‘What’s your plan?’

He takes the gun back from me and tucks it away. ‘Boutiques. I want to rob high-end, high-fashion, exclusive boutiques.’

Is he mocking me? ‘Why boutiques?’

Murad Badshah starts rocking back and forth with excitement as he ticks off the reasons on his fingers. ‘Built on main roads with easy access, rarely more than one guard, good cash-to-patron ratio, small size, risk-averse clientele, high-profile hostage possibilities, little competition. And, as an added bonus, symbolism: they represent the soft underbelly of the upper crust, the ultimate hypocrisy in a country with flour shortages. Boutiques are, in a word, perfect.’

‘It can’t be that easy or someone else would be doing it.’

Murad Badshah smiles. ‘Entrepreneurs tend to ignore that argument.’

I look at him, at his good-natured face, his chin streaked with motor oil. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you know what you’re talking about? Have you done this sort of thing before?’

He looks offended. ‘You doubt my qualifications?’

‘It’s a reasonable question. Don’t look at me like I’ve demanded a copy of your c.v.’

He pulls up his kurta, revealing the long, slow roll of his belly. Dead center, a scar the size and shape of a large bird dropping on a car window.

‘Polio vaccination?’ I ask.

He turns around and bends forward, revealing another, larger scar. ‘Polio vaccinations don’t leave exit wounds.’

I’m relieved. Impressed, even. Exaggerated or not, there’s obviously some truth behind his stories. But one thing still bothers me. Why does Murad Badshah need me if his plan is so good? ‘I don’t know anything about robbing boutiques. I don’t even know how to use a gun.’

‘You can walk into a boutique without arousing suspicion,’ Murad Badshah says. ‘If someone like my mechanics, or my drivers, or even myself showed up, the guard would watch him like a hawk. No offense, but you blend in with those boutique-going types. When you walk in and act like a customer, no one will look at you twice. Then you put a gun against the guard’s head, I come in, we generate some revenue and implement our exit strategy. No violence, no profanity, suitable for viewing by young children, and potentially extremely lucrative.’

‘Let’s do it,’ I say, extending my hand.

We shake. Surprisingly, I don’t feel the slightest tremor of doubt or worry. Must be the hairy. Which reminds me. ‘Do you have any more heroin?’

He’s quiet for a moment, looking at the rickshaw lying on its side. ‘My supplies have been cut off by the rain. The Jamrod-Lahore trucking circuit has been disrupted.’

Just my luck. ‘That’s bad news. I’m completely out.’

‘Don’t do any more. I’m being very serious now, old chap.’

‘How do you know I’ve done any?’

‘You look awful. Besides, I can see you’re on it right now.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your eyes. And you keep scratching yourself.’

I have to remember not to do that. ‘Are you sure you don’t have any?’

‘I have a little. But I’m not going to give it to you.’

‘I don’t need your protection.’

He looks at me, surprised at the tone in my voice. Then he shakes his head.

As I wade back to my car, excitement builds inside me. I’m finally taking control of my life. I keep waiting for the fear to come, but it doesn’t. In fact, I’m walking taller, grinning, empowered by the knowledge that I’ve become dangerous, that I can do anything I want.

I get behind the wheel and point my finger at a passing Pajero.

Bang bang.

In the morning, the smell of something burning brings me out of the house and onto the street in search of its source. Neat mounds of rubbish in front of the neighbors’ houses smolder, trash smoke rising only to be beaten down by the rain.

I walk closer.

Definitely an odd smell. Maybe there’s plastic in the heaps. Or maybe the rain does something to the way they burn.

I kick one. Sodden refuse, half-burnt, flies off. Underneath it’s more dry, but I see no fire, no embers even. Just smoke coming out of fissures in the black heart of a trash pile, like steam from the cooled crust of lava.

The stench released is unbearable.

Like burning skin.

I walk inside. But the smell stays with me. On my shoes maybe, on my clothes. It lingers even after I shower.

Even after I dump my clothes in a tub of soapy water.

It clings to me. Wafts over the wall. Makes me want to retch.

I wish Murad Badshah would give me some more hairy. But we’re partners now, and I need him, so I never ask him for any when he comes by. Wouldn’t want to worry the old boy. Instead, we discuss strategy: the boutiques he’s scoped out, the gun he’s going to buy for me (the cost will be deducted from my share of our eventual take), when we’re going to do target practice, et cetera. I want to get on with it, but he keeps telling me to be patient, saying that planning is nine-tenths of the work.

‘I’m running out of things to sell,’ I tell him. ‘Yesterday someone bought my television.’

He adjusts himself inside the folds of his shalwar. ‘I wish I could help, old chap, but the rickshaw business has been dead since the tests. My customers are worried about food prices. They prefer to walk.’

Luckily, I have another idea where I can get some hairy. I’ve seen fellow aficionados chilling out in the old city near Badshahi Mosque.

I wait until late at night. The last prayer of the day has been prayed, and there isn’t much traffic in the area except for revelers and diners on their way to Heera Mandi. I park my car and walk down the street, the walls and minarets of the mosque towering up to my left. Scattered beneath them, sitting or staggering about in their moon shadows, are the very people I was hoping to meet: junkies.

I know I’m in the right place by the smell, and by the faces floating in the great womb of the drug, content to stay there until they die. Which shouldn’t be long, by the looks of some of them.

I hunt for someone to buy from, but he finds me before I find him.

‘Heroin?’ he asks from behind me.

I turn. He has awful teeth, a rotting smile. But he’s clean, unlike the addicts. Without waiting for an answer he puts out his hand and says, ‘One hundred.’

I give it to him, and he passes me something that I slip into my pocket.

‘How do you know I’m not a policeman?’ I ask him.

‘It doesn’t matter if you are. Same price, same price.’

I grin, but he seems to find nothing funny in what he’s said and wanders off, prowling around the addicts like a shepherd tending to his flock.

At home I’m apprehensive until I try the stuff, wondering if he’s sold me rat poison, but it turns out to be fine. I spend much of the night smoking and wake up exhausted the next evening. The curtains are wide open. A murder of crows flaps around the gray sky, coming to land one by one on power lines across the street. Somewhere a dog offers up a token bark, but they ignore him and go about their business in silence.

I know I need a meal, even if my stomach isn’t bothering to say it’s hungry, so I fry myself a couple of eggs and toast some bread over the gas flame. Sometimes hairy kills my appetite.

The other thing hairy kills is time, and that’s good, because when Murad Badshah isn’t visiting, which is most of the day, I have nothing to do. My only fear is that some relative or unwanted visitor will drop by and see me and my house in the state we’re in, which is filthy. So I keep the gate locked and don’t answer unless I hear the right open sesame: beep beep bee-bee-beep.

I’m getting good at moth badminton. I now play sitting down, and I try to be unpredictable so the moths will never know when it’s safe. Sometimes they whir by my face or even land on me and I leave them alone. At other times they fly at full velocity several feet away and I slam them with an extended forehand.

Here are my rules. I play left hand versus right hand, squash-style. That is, I switch hands whenever I try to hit a moth and fail to connect. At first, I gave a hand a point just for hitting a moth. Then I made it more difficult by adding the ‘ping’ test. According to the ‘ping’ test, a hand scores only when the moth makes a ‘ping’ as it’s struck by the racquet. If I hit a moth but there’s no ‘ping,’ it’s a let and the hand must ‘ping’ a moth on its next attempt, or the racquet switches to the opposing hand. Three factors come into play here: moth size (small moths rarely ‘ping’), stroke speed (only delicate swings produce ‘pings’), and racquet position (most ‘pings’ come from the racquet’s sweet spot). My racquet is made of wood, and I’ve managed to misplace its racquet press, so it’s beginning to warp in the humid monsoon air. As a result, finding the sweet spot and successfully ‘pinging’ becomes increasingly difficult. Scores drop rapidly, until a good evening ends with a tally of left four versus right two, or something like that. I’m right-handed, but my left seems to win more often than not, which pleases me, because I tend to sympathize with underdogs.

I often find myself smiling when I’m playing moth badminton. What amuses me is the power I’ve discovered in myself, the power to kill moths when I feel like it, the power to walk up to someone and take their money and still put a bullet in them, anyway, just for the hell of it, if that’s what I want to do. And I’m amazed that it took me so long to come to this realization, that I spent all this time feeling helpless. Self-pity is pathetic. Hear that, little moth? Ping!

Murad Badshah drops by at night. I try to interest him in some moth badminton, without success. He’s decided on a boutique, a shop in Defense near LUMS.

The thing is getting serious. For two days we take turns staking out the boutique, recording what time police patrols pass and guards change. Sometimes I smoke hairy and doze off on my shifts, napping in my car right in front of the place we’re supposed to rob. As a result, my reports are impressionistic rather than empirically accurate.

Even though I’ve stopped scratching myself, I can tell Murad Badshah still wonders if I’m on hairy. The doubt makes him angry. When he gets angry I can see why people might be afraid of him. But I deny it, and he never hits me. Which is good for him, and for me, too, because I don’t want to break up our partnership. Besides, he has thick bones, the kind that can hurt your hand if you aren’t wearing a glove.

Always remember to lock, I tell myself. The gate, the front door. There isn’t much of value in the house that’s light enough to be carried away, just a powerless AC and fridge, really, so sometimes I get careless. And when Dadi comes in, waddling as she has since she broke her hip, and Fatty Chacha follows behind her, then I shut my eyes for an instant, at once desperate to disappear and furious with myself for letting this happen, before I get to my feet and greet them.

A half-filled aitch-in-progress crumples in the fist of my left hand. A smattering of tobacco peppered with hairy falls quietly from my right. It’s dark inside and sunny out, a rare bright afternoon, and I’m hoping their eyes haven’t adjusted enough to make out what I was up to.

‘I’ve been trying to call you since your birthday, but there was no answer.’ Fatty Chacha’s voice trails off. Dadi is staring at me.

‘I’m so happy you’ve come,’ I say, gesturing to the sofa. ‘Please.’

They don’t move. Finally, Dadi speaks. ‘What happened to you, child?’

I force a laugh. ‘This?’ I say, raising my cast-encased forearm. ‘It’s nothing. A car accident.’

Dadi’s eyes are watery but still keen. She touches my face. ‘You’ve been hurt badly.’ Her horrified expression makes me want to recoil. She strokes my scars, her shriveled finger remarkably soft.

‘But when did this happen?’ Fatty Chacha asks.

I want to lie, but I’m afraid they won’t believe me. ‘A month ago,’ I admit.

‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘I didn’t want you to worry.’

‘Foolish boy,’ Dadi says, sitting down.

Fatty Chacha remains standing. ‘What’s happened to the house? It’s a mess.’

‘Manucci left.’

‘Impossible.’

‘He walked out on me.’

‘But why?’

‘He wanted more pay.’ I can see that Fatty Chacha is doubtful, and I’m about to say more when Dadi calls me over to sit beside her and pats me on the cheek.

‘Do you know,’ she says, trying to reassure herself, ‘your father never told me when he broke his nose at the military academy. Just like you.’

‘He was far away,’ Fatty Chacha points out, sitting down. ‘There was nothing we could have done to help.’

‘But I’m fine,’ I protest.

‘You don’t look fine, champ,’ Fatty Chacha says. ‘Is there some kind of infection? You seem ill.’

‘No infection. It was a bad accident.’

‘You must have lost twenty pounds.’

I force a grin. ‘I’m back in my weight class.’

Dadi takes a proprietary hold on my upper lip and pulls it back. ‘You’ve lost a tooth.’

‘So have you,’ I say cheekily.

She chuckles, but I can see she’s still shaken. She asks how the accident happened, and I invent a story, claiming I don’t remember many details because of the shock. Dadi strokes my good hand as I speak and Fatty Chacha keeps shaking his head, whether in sympathy or out of disbelief it’s hard to say.

To change the subject, I ask about Jamal’s business.

‘He’s doing well,’ Fatty Chacha says. ‘They have two new clients, with no discount this time.’

Dadi offers to move in with me and stay until I’m better, but I manage to convince her not to. She tells me I must promise to visit her every day or she will worry. When they ask if I have tea I admit that I’m out of milk.

As they leave, visibly reluctant to go, Fatty Chacha insists on giving me five hundred rupees. Taking hold of my upper arm, he says quietly, ‘Come to see me tomorrow. I’m serious, Daru. I’m very worried about you.’

And with that, I’m alone again. I lock the gate and the front door. Then I retrieve the battered aitch from my pocket and see what I can salvage.

The day I go to the hospital and have my cast cut off and emerge from the last of my cocoon, the day I can again see the muscles in my forearm when I flex my hand into a fist, is also the day Murad Badshah finally takes me out of the city for some target practice. He’s bought me my gun: a 9-millimeter automatic, black, used, Chinese. Just a tool, really, like a stapler. A stapler that can punch through a person. Pin them. Drive blunt metal through flesh and bone.

I’ve always had steady hands, so I’m surprised to discover that I’m a bad shot. Horrific, really. At twenty paces, I can hit a tin can about one time in five. As for moving targets, I have no hope. Walking from left to right, I don’t hit it even once in fifteen minutes of shooting. Murad Badshah tells me not to worry. There will only be one guard, and with my gun pressed against his head there should be no reason to actually shoot, and no way to miss if I do. At the end of half an hour of practice we start running low on ammunition, and we can’t afford any more. So that’s it: our prep work is over and we now have no reason to procrastinate. Time to move on to the real thing.

At home I keep playing with the gun, unloading and reloading the magazine, chambering rounds, popping them out. It’s strange that pistols are such inaccurate devices. If I designed something with the power to kill people, I’d want it to give the user a little more control. But I’m not complaining. There’s something appealing about it, something wonderfully casual in the knowledge that when you squeeze the trigger you might kill someone or miss them completely. I like that. After all, moth badminton would be less fun if my racquet wasn’t so warped.

My father gets off his motorcycle and runs his hands through his short hair, cropped close in accordance with military academy regulations. He gives his olive suit a once-over, making sure that nothing is amiss, and heads inside. For three coins the white-gloved attendant at the ticket box gives him a seat, not in the most expensive section, but not in the least expensive one, either.

He chooses a well-upholstered couch behind a group of young ladies, students at Kinnaird College who pretend not to notice him, and lights a cigarette. Refined conversation fills the enormous cinema with a gentle murmur. Once all have risen for the national anthem and then sat down again, once the lights have dimmed and the projector has whirled to life, only then does my father reach forward and squeeze the hand my mother extends back to him.

At intermission they eat cucumber sandwiches and sip tea, standing next to each other like strangers. Although he does bow slightly to her as he passes a plate, and her friends cannot help smiling with their eyes.

The Regal Cinema did at one time deserve its name.

Now I sit on a broken seat at the very back, a seat, not a couch, with a crack that pinches my bottom when I move, munching on a greasy bag of chips, trying to ignore the shouting of the men next to me as Chow Yun-Fat kicks his way to another victory for the common man, for good over evil, for hope over tyranny. I love kung fu flicks from Hong Kong. They’re the only movies I go to see in the cinema anymore. Everything else is better on a VCR, without the smells and sounds of the audience. But not kung fu.

A fight breaks out somewhere in the middle rows, with much yelling and hooting. People surge up and at each other as Chow flashes a six-foot grin over the scene. One of the men to my left throws a packet of chips into the scuffle. There are no women to be seen here, except on screen, and when those appear, the men in the audience go wild, whistling joyously. Maybe the real ones are in private boxes. Maybe they know better than to come to see Chow Yun-Fat on opening night. Or to go to the cinema at all. No woman I know goes unless the entire cinema has been reserved in advance. Reserved for the right sort of people, that is.

I sit for a while after the movie is over, watching the unruly audience make its way out, sad at what’s happened to this place since my parents were my age. Look at us now: we can’t even watch a film together in peace. I cover my face with my hands and it feels hot, my entire head feels hot. I’m on edge. I think I need some hairy.

The cinema is almost empty when I realize someone is watching me. I stare at him, and he hesitates for a moment before walking over, motorcycle helmet in hand. Thick black beard. Intelligent eyes. Looks about my age. Salaams.

I return the greeting.

‘Have we met before?’ he asks me. Calm voice.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Were you at GC?’

‘I was, as a matter of fact.’

‘I remember. You were a boxer.’

I nod, surprised.

‘So was I,’ he says.

I extend my hand. ‘Darashikoh Shezad.’

He shakes it firmly. ‘Mujahid Alam. I was a year junior to you. Middleweight.’

‘Now I remember. The beard is new.’

He looks around the deserted theater. ‘I came over because you looked upset.’

‘I’m fine,’ I say, a little taken aback.

‘Did you find today’s spectacle disturbing?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All the shouting, the fighting, the disorderliness. Our brothers have no discipline. They’ve lost their self-respect.’

‘One can hardly blame them.’

He lowers his voice and continues in a tone both conspiratorial and friendly. ‘Exactly. Our political system’s at fault. Men like us have no control over our own destinies. We’re at the mercy of the powerful.’

Normally a speech like this from a virtual stranger would seem odd. But something in the way he says it makes me comfortable, drawing me in. I lean forward to hear him better.

‘We need a system,’ he goes on, and it sounds like he’s quoting something, ‘where a man can rely on the law for justice, where he’s given basic dignity as a human being and the opportunity to prosper regardless of his status at birth.’

‘I agree.’

‘Then come to our meeting tomorrow.’

‘What meeting?’

‘A gathering of like-minded people, brothers who believe as you and I do that the time has come for change.’

I’m not surprised. I could tell he was a fundo from the moment I saw him. But at the same time, I’ve taken a liking to him and I’m reluctant to let him down. I say gently, ‘I’m not a very good brother, brother. I don’t think I’m the sort you’re trying to recruit.’

He smiles. ‘I’m not recruiting you. I just keep my eyes open for like-minded men. Besides, no believer is a bad believer.’

‘And what if I’m not a believer at all?’

‘You should still come. None of us can change things acting on our own. And to act together we need direction. What else is belief but direction? A common direction toward a better end?’

I smile. ‘We could be hiding enormous differences.’

‘If differences can be hidden, perhaps they aren’t differences at all. Maybe you’re more of a believer than you think.’

I look at him. He seems like such a nice, earnest guy. ‘Tell me where the meeting is.’

He writes it for me on a piece of paper, and as we part ways he shakes my hand with both of his. ‘I hope we’ll meet again.’

‘As God wills,’ I reply.

He accepts that with a nod.

In the car I take an aitch out of the glove compartment. Pre-rolled. I thought I might need one after the movie. I light up, thinking about Mujahid. What a nice guy. I hope he doesn’t get himself killed trying to make things better for the rest of us. I guess there are all kinds of fundos these days. And they’re obviously well organized if they even have a sales pitch for people like me.

I can’t say that I entirely disagree with their complaints, either.

But I’m definitely not going to that meeting. I roll the paper Mujahid gave me into a ball and toss it out the window.

I need a drink.

I watch a lizard strut along a wall, its shoulders and hips moving in a sensuous swagger. I can’t tell if it’s dark brown or dark green in the candlelight, but I can see that it’s missing half its tail. Lizards look obscene without their tails, naked somehow. But tails grow back eventually, if the lizard is lucky and lives long enough. And this lizard is already only partly naked, partly tailless. Partly bald, like Ozi. Or partly damaged, like me, with my nine good fingers.

I like its eyes: two black dots, nonreflective light-trappers. Utterly determined eyes, doubt-free, unselfconscious. Frightening eyes if they happen to be looking at you and you’re small enough to be dinner. The same eyes a man probably sees on an alligator before it drags him down and shakes the air out of his lungs and leaves him to rot a little in the murk, to be tenderized properly before he becomes a meal.

The lizard dashes forward and stops. Two feet away, on the wall above a candle, taking a much-deserved breather from hectic lovemaking, sits one of my shuttlecocks in waiting: a moth the perfect size for pinging. Black dots eye dinner. And dinner, exhausted from a rather strenuous dance with the candle, pants with its wings folded in an aero-dynamic delta, more sleekly angled at rest than in flight.

The lizard steps forward. Two steps. Two more. Then four. Stops. Dinner doesn’t move. Black dots come closer, close enough to blow moth dust off dinner if the lizard should happen to sneeze. But dinner doesn’t seem to think of itself as dinner. No, dinner is completely caught up in its own fantasy, a romantic Majnoon, antennae unkempt, warming itself in the updraft of heat from the flame of much-loved Laila.

Slowly, with no hurry at all, the lizard takes the moth into its mouth and squeezes. Only now does dinner realize it is dinner, one wing trembling frantically until it breaks off and falls like a flower petal, twirling. The lizard swallows, pulling the moth deeper into its mouth, then swallows again. And that’s that.

I clap loudly, my legs crossed at the knee, smiling at the lizard. Thanks for the entertainment. Clapclapclap.

Echoes bounce back from the walls.

Mumtaz comes. She doesn’t want to go inside. So even though a light rain is falling, we stand by her car.

‘I missed you,’ I say, reaching for her.

She steps back and looks down without saying anything.

Her silence frightens me. I say, to make her speak, ‘What have you been up to?’

‘I’ve been writing.’

‘Zulfikar Manto?’

She nods. ‘A piece on corruption.’

How convenient. ‘You can do all the research without leaving your house.’

She looks at me, and the sadness in her face makes me want to hold her. ‘Daru, it’s over.’

Has she left him? ‘What?’ I ask, wanting to make sure.

‘This. I’m not going to be coming to see you anymore.’

Confusion. What is she saying? Stay calm. Try to sort out what’s happening.

‘You can’t just walk away from this,’ I say.

She reaches out and hugs me, pulls my head down to her shoulder. ‘I can. I’m sorry, Daru. We can’t be lovers anymore.’

‘Why are you saying this?’ I whisper.

‘I was never going to leave Ozi for you. I told you that from the beginning.’

I step back, disengaging myself from her embrace. ‘Do you know he killed a boy?’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was there. I saw him. He ran him over.’

‘Stop it.’

‘He didn’t even bother to stop. He just drove off.’

‘Don’t do this.’

‘But he’s a murderer. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? How can you stay with him?’

‘I’m leaving.’

Suddenly I understand. I grab her arm. ‘Has he threatened you?’ I’m screaming. ‘I’ll kill him! I’ll kill the bastard!’

She tries to pull away, but I hold her by the wrist, tight.

‘Let go of me.’

‘I have a gun. If he hurts you, I’ll kill him.’

She twists violently and pulls her arm free. ‘He hasn’t threatened me,’ she says, backing away.

‘Wait. Don’t go.’

She stops at the door of her car. ‘Daru, please do something about yourself. Tell your family. You need help. You shouldn’t be alone.’ She looks at me for a moment, then slams the door shut and drives off.

I wait for her in the driveway, but she doesn’t come back. Then I go inside and sit down and wipe my face, but no matter how much I wipe, it seems to stay wet.

And everyone on my street must be incinerating their garbage, because the stench of burning flesh is so strong I can’t sleep. Once, in the darkness, I even imagine that I’m on fire, smoke rising from my body, and leap out of bed.

But it’s nothing. Just a moth fluttering by my eyes.

I lie awake and think.

And the more I think, the clearer it becomes. Ozi hasn’t threatened her. It’s Muazzam. Muazzam is the problem.

I never won a championship when I boxed for GC. Our coach used to say that the guys who win championships are the ones who decide they aren’t going down, no matter what. I was one of the best boxers on the team, and I worked hard, but he still disliked me. He told me I wasn’t a real boxer, because there was only so much pain I was prepared to fight through. My last fight was for the All-Punjab. I was TKO’d in two rounds with a bad cut above my left eye. The coach said I was a coward.

But I’ve decided that I’m not going to lose Mumtaz. I’m not going down this time.

In the morning I find myself heading out for a drive. I’ve taken my gun with me. First I pass by my bank, slowing down to watch the customers slipping inside. Then I drive to Shuja’s house. The gunman outside doesn’t recognize me, even though my Suzuki must be distinctive with its smashed windows. I stop and stare at him, my gun on my lap. He looks uncomfortable and goes behind the gate. And that makes me feel good.

Eventually I find myself where I knew I’d end up: parked near Ozi’s house. I think Mumtaz told me he was out of town, in Macau or something, but I don’t care if he is here, if he does drive up and see me. I’ll tell him I’m having an affair with his wife. What can he do about it?

But I don’t see him, and I don’t see Mumtaz either, which is fine with me. Because I’m hoping to see someone else. And early in the afternoon, when the sun comes out and the gray clouds part to reveal a beautiful blue sky, I do see him: little Muazzam, in a black Lancer with his nanny and a driver.

I slip into first and follow. Muazzam is what stands between Mumtaz and me. She feels so guilty about leaving him that she’s willing to stay in a meaningless marriage. I wonder what would happen if Muazzam got into a car accident, if he died suddenly. Mumtaz might be upset for a while. But eventually it would be better for her. She would be free, happy again, able to come to me. What adventures the two of us could have. We would be unstoppable.

The Lancer takes a left, heading toward FC College. Dirty water stretches across the road, hiding potholes, and the driver slows down. I get closer. I can see the driver’s eyes in his rearview mirror. Then he accelerates, the Lancer pulling away, and I have to floor my Suzuki to keep up. But he isn’t trying to lose me. He slows down again at a roundabout, takes a right. I’m very close. Muazzam disappears. Then he stands up again on the rear seat, his curly head visible through the window, just ten feet away from me.

The Lancer gives a left indicator and turns into the driveway of a house I remember, Ozi’s grandfather’s place. We used to play there sometimes, when we were younger.

Dark clouds with red bellies, lit from below by the electric city or a last gasp of light from the drowning sun, and a smoky breeze that stinks of burning flesh from the trash pile down the street. A joint in my mouth, heavy on the hairy, and a 9-millimeter automatic tucked into my jeans, pressed into my hipbone, bruising my flesh painlessly because of the numbness. Crows flap against the wind, sitting on a telephone line, quiet, watching the outnumbered parrots in my banyan tree.

Finally, fear stronger than the hairy can hide.

I’m so scared that I feel like throwing up. I’d force my finger down my throat and make myself gag if it would make me a little less dizzy. But I’m not drunk, I’m frightened, and I don’t think vomiting would be much help.

Murad Badshah arrives and parks his rickshaw, and we head out in my car. We don’t speak much. For once, even Murad Badshah doesn’t have anything to say. He keeps adjusting himself under his shalwar, or maybe he’s trying to find a comfortable position for his revolver.

The hand brake makes a loud sound when I pull it up. Light pours out of the big glass windows of the boutique. Mannequins cast shadows on our car. Murad Badshah reminds me what I have to do, and even though I’m listening, I don’t understand a word he’s saying. My college boxing coach once had to slap me before a fight to get me to attend to his instructions.

I get out, feeling self-conscious. Then I turn and walk into the boutique. The guard stares at me and my heart starts pounding in my head, hard. I stare back at the guard like I’m a rude patron. I realize I’ll kill him if I have to. He’s a young guy, balding, with dark skin and glistening temples and a mole like a fly on his left nostril. He’s sitting on a stool with a short-barreled pump-action shotgun across his thighs, and I’m standing beside him so its barrel is pointing at my knees. If he squeezes the trigger he’ll blow my legs off.

I walk out of his line of fire and his eyes don’t follow me. An ugly kid who looks like Muazzam is crying and pulling on his mother’s arm, and the sound is so unnerving that I want to shoot him to prevent myself from panicking.

Get hold of yourself.

Walk around, avoiding eye contact, touching fabrics, seeing who’s here. No men except the guard and one of the salespeople, who looks harmless. The other salesperson is a fierce-faced woman with arms bigger than mine. Keep my distance from both of them, because my mouth is dry and I’m zoned on hairy, so I don’t know how well I can talk. If they ask me what I’m looking for, I might shoot them. I think shooting something might calm me down. I feel hysterical. That damn kid keeps crying and tugging on his mother.

I walk up to the guard and pull the automatic out of my jeans and put it in his face. His shotgun isn’t pointing at me. I notice that my finger’s on the trigger guard instead of the trigger, so I slip it into the right place. I click off the safety. The guard watches me. Above his head I can see my reflection in the window, and I look just as calm as he does, but I’m not calm at all and I don’t think he is either. He’s raising his hands, which is good. They’re not near the shotgun.

I can’t believe I forgot to take my automatic off safety before I came in. He could have killed me. Thinking that makes me want to kill someone just to calm down.

Murad Badshah’s here. He’s taking control. Good. The salespeople are giving him a lot of money. The customers are taking off their jewelry, their purses. The guard is lying on his face, his shotgun out of reach, and I realize I’m standing on his right hand, but I don’t move. I look around me, feeling embarrassed, but no one seems to notice.

A police mobile drives by on the street outside without stopping. I watch it. If they stop I’m dead, and the first thing I’m going to do is start shooting. Shooting anyone and anything. But the police keep on going.

I take my foot off the guard’s hand, but this makes me nervous.

The woman with the kid yells something, and I look and see the boy running for the door. I don’t move. Little ugly boy who looks like Muazzam. Runs right by me and reaches the door. No one gets out, that’s the rule. No one gets out.

My hand. Hand’s rising. Hand with the gun in it. Leveling off at Muazzam’s head. He’s not going to make it to Mumtaz. He’s not going to ruin this.

The sound of an explosion and the glass of the door becomes opaque with cracks but doesn’t shatter.

Was that me?