Munib Khan

Shah Hussain

Dr. Babar made me read passages from Shah Hussain’s biography on my phone one day. The text of the biography was old Urdu, the kind I used to read when I was a boy, lived in Lahore, and loved playing cricket; I had so much hope in me then. The language of the biography, translated from Persian, was elevated and antiquated, decadent yet somehow strangely appropriate. Who was I to complain? With Dr. Babar caressing his beard, waiting for me to finish the excerpts he pointed out, steam rising from my cappuccino, the sounds of students congregated in that terrace rising and rising, and the view of the congested and confused campus somehow framed in a dignified manner by a row of trees that stood upright and stared back at us. Rosewood trees, I thought. Of course, the biography worked on me. We spoke about it for an hour and then finally I understood the argument between Dr. Babar and the poet Hasham Ali. It’s one thing to know such a matter vaguely and then quite another to have the text in front of you. After I left campus and weeks passed and the university was in lock down, I still thought of Shah Hussain and his lover and apprentice, Madho Lal, the teenage boy; Shah Hussain standing in the Ravi night after night to prove his devotion to God; Shah Hussain adoring Madho Lal with that same devotion. That this love story was orally preserved for hundreds of years by the same city I walked now, that this story with all its queerness and surrealness was preserved in the form that I was inheriting. I began to walk in the Old City. I hadn’t done that since my school years.

One day Dr. Irfan, who also walked the Old City at night, saw me and invited me for chai. The shop he gestured towards was a few hundred yards away. We sat on plastic lawn chairs. Bright colored tables, movie posters from the 70s on walls. Dr. Irfan went to the front of the shop to make sure the milk was good. He always did that, smelled the milk, looked around to make sure it wasn’t from a box. He told everyone that he was an atheist on the first meeting, and in my mind it gave him some credibility, even though his doctorate was in Communication Studies, a field I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now. He wore his usual khaki pants and gray shirt with several buttons undone. His hair was white, his beard was unruly. He had lived for a long time in Canada, he’d traveled the world, he could recite Urdu poetry at will, and he often did. He sang without inhibition. And he was drunk every night. He was sixty years old, though I didn’t feel there were thirty years between us when we sat with our colleagues in the coffee shops at the university. Here, suddenly, alone with him for a change, I felt our age difference. I felt like I should be deferential to him.

We spoke about our colleagues from the university, the ones we had spoken to lately, the ones who were already in the mountains writing their books. We spoke about the university owners and the construction projects taking place at great speed during the lockdown. I told him about the biography of Shah Hussain and walking the streets.

He said, You’re writing something then.

Hmmm, I said.

Do you know much about him?

Not really, I told him. I couldn’t explain to him then that I knew hardly anything about Shah Hussain, that I was one of those writers who has no value to add to the larger body of knowledge in the world. I was like one of those pedestrians who stops at the sight of a roadkill out of sheer curiosity, then walks away. Who Shah Hussain was in real life didn’t matter to me. I cared only about being able to use a name antiquated and deeply embedded in the memory of the city for my novel. To shove it in there somehow. I felt it was only right for my kind of writer to do this.

Have you been to the dhamal? he asked me.

I thought they had stopped—

Why would they stop? He was incredulous.

Terrorism. I was abroad when they became big. Since returning I haven’t really ventured out much.

You should go, he said. It happens every night. How can you miss it?

He was right, I should have gone. But I had seen enough dhamal on the internet. I watched documentaries on it, the rush of humans with stained teeth standing in close proximity in prayer and reverence, smelled the scented air even through my computer screen. And the music was good, I thought. But it wasn’t music I would stand in the cold for. Any fool can make himself uncomfortable, I know this. I am no fool. I will go and stand in the cold—if I love someone and they can see me in the cold. But I will not stand in the cold without cause, without any hope of reward. I am no Shah Hussain in this way, I guess. Because he gave up his religion, identity, and even his own name for some boy he saw walking on the street. He gave it up without thinking, without even first speaking to the boy. So I agree with Dr. Babar who took the poet Hasham Ali to task in front of me at the beginning of the year for teaching a class called Queering Shah Hussain. Of course, it’s a queer story, Dr. Babar thought, but calling it just queer is missing the point. It’s also imposing a modern western frame on a deeply South Asian story. At that moment, I sided with Hasham Ali because I saw the look on his face. Hasham Ali is a gay man, and he faces enough bullshit in Lahore on a daily basis to have to tolerate it from his friends too. And so later when Dr. Babar made me read the excerpts from the biography, in that old and elevated Urdu, taken from Persian, taken from an oral tale passed down enmasse by the devoted residents of the city, I understood what Dr. Babar meant.

The waiter brought chai on a steel tray. Small cups filled to the brim. He placed them on the plastic table.

Do you want something to eat? Dr. Irfan asked.

What do they have?

Let me order. He looked at the waiter and gestured for him to come close. The waiter didn’t wear a mask. Few people in the Old City wore a mask. Aik aloo wala paratha, aik mooli wala paratha, not too much ghee.

The waiter nodded. In the bulb light, I looked at his features. Softened, a youthful face, university-student age. I looked at the time on my watch. It was past midnight. In the narrow alleyway, a rickshaw coughed, came to life, slipped out onto the main road. On a small TV, a news bulletin played on mute. From somewhere the sound of music came. It was a Punjabi song from the 90s that one could dance to but that’s all I knew about the music. No name, no music video, nothing came to mind. Dr. Irfan lit a cigarette and put the pack and his lighter on the table. He was quiet now, uninterested in conversation. I picked up the pack and opened it. I fumbled until I found a cigarette and lit it. I don’t smoke much as it affects my running, but I thought the occasion demanded it. And I wanted to smoke with chai. I picked up my cup, inhaled the smoke, then watched it come out of my mouth. The chai tasted sweet as I expected, too sweet for my liking, but the color was good and there was the comfort of the cool night. It began to work upon me. I felt lightheaded and calmer than I’d felt all day.

On a cool night like this perhaps the mob had come hunting for Shah Hussain and Madho Lal. An old-school lynching party, misguided as usual. They were looking to kill them not because they were two men who were lovers, but because they feared that the love might mean that Madho Lal would renounce his Hindu faith and become a Muslim or that Shah Hussain would renounce his Muslim faith and become a Hindu. It came down to the same thing. A multicultural lynching party then. The same group of men had gone looking for the couple on the same street night after night, and each night they found a wall where the door was supposed to be, but on this night they saw the door and walked through into the house, into the room where Shah Hussain and Madho Lal lay in each other’s arms drunk. When the men entered the bedroom, they saw not two men, but two lions standing on the bed, their manes glowing in the dim light of the lantern, their bodies burnished and taking up the whole room. Then what happened, I don’t remember. Needless to say, they did not manage to kill Shah Hussain and Madho Lal, perhaps some of them became believers. But believers in what? What was the belief system of the people who remembered Shah Husaain year after year? I’d asked Dr. Babar. He gave me the answer. I laughed and said, That’s blasphemy, Dr. Sahib.

Our chai was finished in silence, and it was only when the parathas came that Dr. Irfan and I woke from our individual reveries. I didn’t know what kept him awake at night. Or why he walked the streets. He does not publish much, his work has a communal bent, towards organizing, creating spaces where certain conversations can happen. Atheism, marxism, sufism, ghazal, those are his interests. A collaborator then who values his loneliness. He has a wife who is an academic; I have not met her.

The waiter placed the parathas on the table, then left without a word. Both parathas were on one plate and there was a bowl of yogurt mixed with some herbs. We began to eat, Dr. Irfan tearing a part of the paratha, murmuring So hot, then dipping it in the yogurt and placing it in his mouth. He closed his eyes in pleasure and called for more chai. The parathas were nice, even better with the yogurt. It felt good to break bread with him in silence at this late hour, then wipe our hands clean on our jeans and say goodbye and walk to the opposite sides of the City. I didn’t know my way very well. Even in familiar places, I like to allow my mind to wander. I am a daydreamer. I talk to myself. It’s okay to get lost, I think, as long as you’re not in a hurry. I had nowhere else to go, no one waited for me except my mother. So I messaged her, told her I would be late, I was working. It was true, I was working. I could feel as the night descended, as the lights were turned off, as the cats and stray dogs began to appear at the corners of the alleyways that this was going to be work.

In the late hours of the night, no matter where you are in the world, with everyone asleep there is a particular kind of solitude and a temporary kind of respite that can be easily discovered, and I have always known this, though I don’t often seek it. It’s good to know that it’s there. On this night, I tried to picture Shah Hussain on this alleyway in the moonlight. A scholar, a mystic, a believer who finds something better than faith even, something that transforms his faith. A supposed performer of miracles. A lover. Dressed in a bum’s clothes, with an overgrown beard. These miracle workers, they never have time to shave or take a bath or put on cologne. Yet they want the most beautiful and youthful, virgin lovers for themselves. So was there manipulation in that love? Madho Lal, almost a boy still; Shah Hussain almost an old man. How does the story go then? I tried to remember the words from the biography. I could have easily picked up my phone and found the text and read it, but I let my mind wander and find the cursive script. Madho Lal, described as virginal, beautiful, and spoiled. Hard and handsome. I had laughed at the word hard. Not strong, but hard. The person who wrote the Persian biography and the person who translated it into Urdu were no literary scholars. They were madrassah-educated, but somewhere outside their madrassha they learned about Shah Hussain, found a way to love him. In love, they wrote the story they heard and translated it as best as they could, even when it contained blasphemy. But when the story was written, blasphemy was no big deal in this part of the world, or wasn’t a big deal most days of the year.

I thought of the graduate student named Umar Mukhtar who was in prison in Gujranwala for blasphemy. He’d come to a reading of mine in Key West; he was working for the conference in exchange for room and board then. He had a black beard, long hair, a mustache, a kind face, and he wore large glasses. After my reading, as I stepped off the stage, he came forward and shook my hand. My hands were wet and shaking; I’d just just wiped some tears. I cry when I read sometimes, I know it’s embarrassing, and I’m working on putting a stop to it. That night in Key West, we drank beers together with a group of American writers and then grabbed pizza slices. Before leaving, we exchanged numbers. I said, Send me your work. Some years later, he came to Gujranwala on a semester-long break to write part of his graduate thesis on the poems of John Ashberry; he found a teaching gig at the University of Gujranwala and that’s where the incident happened that landed him in prison. I read about it on social media, through a petition that was forwarded to me. It was strange to see a familiar face in such an unexpected context. He looked happy in the picture, the kind of picture one uses on a resume or a networking website.

We never exchanged work, never communicated after the conference. But when I moved back to Lahore last year, I went to see him in prison in Gujranwala. He’d been there a year already. He was kept in solitary to protect him from other prisoners, I was told. Dr. Babar came with me. He knew the DIG Police in Punjab so he arranged this meeting. Dr. Babar likes these kinds of interviews and he has a personal interest in the matter as, according to him, people are always conspiring to accuse him of blasphemy.

Umar remembered me and looked happy to see me. He’d shaved, and he handed me some poems to read as I was leaving. Just in case, he said. He spoke carefully as we were not alone, a constable hovered nearby. We spoke standing up. Dr. Babar snapped photographs of the hallway. For my personal records, he said to the guard. No pictures of the prisoners, the guard said. I just like the light, Dr. Babar said. Perhaps these things only happened in Gujranwala, or other peripheral towns like that, brimming with humans but not enough cultural context to refine the sensibilities of the residents, not enough history to contain the multitudes and their misguided impulses. That can’t be right. People get lynched in Lahore all the time. I read in the newspaper of a man who was attacked with bricks as he stepped out of the court, and the brick throwers were all lawyers. The governor of the province was shot by his guard in Islamabad for speaking in favor of a blasphemy victim. What about Lahore? I wondered again. I heard a sound to my left and when I turned to look, I saw a white horse standing behind the window bars, staring back at me in earnest. The moonlight fell into the room through the window bars, and I saw that the horse was alone. It was a sad sight to contemplate afterwards but that first moment I turned to look at him, I was in awe of his beauty.

No matter, I thought, enough with Umar Mukhtar. Think only positive thoughts. I have been doing this exercise in my head to boost my overall happiness. Whenever I feel I am close to being gripped by a spiral of negative thoughts, I tell myself, No matter. Then I think of all the things I like about the world. The sun, the moon, the stars, ordinary sights and smells of food, the brisk breeze in the morning, the clear night, walking and running, good music, it’s an endless list because there is much in my life that I truly enjoy. It’s not hard work, and I have never been close to suicide, despite what people who have read my essays might think. But I am prone to periods of negativity, moodiness, melancholy, even a mild sort of depression that usually leads to a productive period of writing. But lately, I’m trying, mostly for my health, to live more happily. It’s not something very difficult, and I’m hopeful in the long run it will not ruin my writing.

I was thinking along these lines of all the moments of happiness, big and small, that sustain me when I thought about a conversation I had with Dr. Babar the week before. We were sitting in my lawn, and I’d asked if he’d mind if I took off my shirt.

Of course not, he said.

It was a gentle winter sun, and my Vitamin D has been low in my latest blood work, so I try to get as much sun as I can. When I took off my shirt, Dr. Babar said, If you hadn’t shaved your chest, the hair would be like the rest of your body.

I have never shaved my chest, I told him. I could tell he didn’t believe me.

Then I began to read the ending of Karl Knausgaard’s My Struggle Part 4. We must have sat in silence for half an hour because I finished the last thirty pages and had tears in my eyes when I finished. I wiped them nonchalantly, but he must have seen them because when Salman brought our chai, and he put away his phone, he said, I must read this book that has been engrossing you so much.

Outside on the street, someone’s gardener mowed the lawn. The occasional horn of a car reached us from the main road. A couple of pigeons sat on the wall, and we stared at them from time to time. I have been turning over this story in my head the past week, Dr. Babar began, and I want to share it with you. I looked at him, his head bowed, a wide smile on his face, the evident pleasure he was taking in setting up the story was familiar to me.

Okay, sir, I said. Begin then.

This story is about my friend, Dr. Babar said, a very talented Urdu poet. He is dead now. He lived in Lahore all his life and he married late. I am aware of these details because I used to see him a lot in those days. He confided in me these things that I am about to share with you. Some of them were written down in letters later as well so there is documented proof, if you should decide to write about him.

I told Dr. Babar that I had enough material to last me a lifetime. I was not in the market for stories.

Be that as it may, Dr. Babar said. The letters are available should they be required. He had trouble talking to women and finally the woman he married was someone who was a lecturer at the Government College, where he was a visiting Professor too. She was a homely person. Very plain, close to him in age. A sexless creature. They never had kids, and even after a month of marriage my friend was bored out of his mind. He had never been with a woman before and the first woman he’d been with had been such a great disappointment. All his poetic longings were still unfulfilled. Yet he had finally gotten the taste of the real thing. He realized what he was missing, and it changed him. Being married gave him confidence to pursue other women.

As it happened he had a student, a teaching assistant in the Masters program, a young woman in her early twenties who began to show an interest in him. Soon, they were sleeping together on a regular basis. It seemed like they were in love with each other. My friend went to his wife and I don’t know what he said to her, poets you know, but he convinced her to allow the girl to move in. The wife was fine with it. She was happy to be finally married and didn’t want to do anything to upset her marriage. She’d quit her job at the university and stayed at home and took care of the house. The poet and his wife and his girlfriend began to sleep together in the same bed. Now don’t ask me about logistics. I am only telling you facts here.

So this is how things were when I used to go visit him in his house. We’d sit in the drawing room. Four or five of his sycophants, these young wannabe writers hanging on to every word of my friend as if he was a prophet, then me and his girlfriend usually sitting in a corner, but not always, sometimes she sat next to him. Once, one of the students mistook the girlfriend for his daughter. But as time passed, even the regulars became acquainted with the arrangement, the wife bringing chai and snacks then leaving hastily, the girlfriend coming into her own, enjoying the attention, the rapt silence of the audience when her husband spoke. Of course, there was always booze going around when others brought it. The poet never offered his personal stash, if he had one. Anyway, the news of this arrangement began to spread by word of mouth and one incident that transpired stoked the gossip.

One of the students of the poet, a guy I know who used to hang around the house all the time, became infatuated with the girlfriend. Did she encourage him? Perhaps. I had received encouragement from her myself, but I was careful. I was working for a European Think Tank that year and getting paid well. A thing I have noticed in life, that perhaps you have experienced as well, is when you are spending money freely, the world notices you, is drawn to you; there is some kind of power in that kind of carelessness with money. The girl, her name, let’s call her Natasha, had given me a couple of significant looks and one evening as I was leaving and waiting for the poet to bring my coat that he’d borrowed, she gave me a hug and then kissed me on the mouth. A brief kiss, if you will, that I paid no attention to.

So, I don’t know what happened with this student, but he wrote a letter about the poet’s living arrangements and circulated it far and wide. At least fifty people received it and I was one of them. In the letter, he recounted the living arrangements of the poet, his dubious financial dealings with his students (and it’s true my friend was strapped for cash and taking loans which he forgot to repay later), and the student then disappeared. I heard last year that he took the Civil Service exams and is now a Session Judge in Vehari.

The sound of the lawn mower worried me. Dr. Babar had epilepsy which was triggered by certain frequencies of pitch. He carried noise blocking headphones with him wherever he went. But I didn’t want to break his rhythm. He was leaning forward as he spoke and looking intently at the grass, as if he could see the people there.

The Head of the Physics department at the Government College, Dr. Butt, was a good friend of the poet and he’d received the letter too and he’d heard the poet talk about his living arrangements, his young lover; as poets sometimes do, my friend had imparted certain confidences about his sex life that had roused in Dr. Butt strong feelings of jealousy. This part I am not only surmising, but I know for a fact because Dr. Butt later confessed these details to the poet. So Dr. Butt thought if this poor poet, who teaches as an adjunct, can get this woman, I am a tenured professor, Head of the Department, and I have family money too. What about me? he thought. On one of his visits to the poet’s house, he told Natasha, If you are happy living with someone’s wife, then okay, but here is a key to your own apartment, if you want to be with me. And Natsaha took the key. Just like that, she walked out with him, with nothing but her clothes.

Natasha. That girl. Oh man. She is about your age now so she must not have been older than twenty three when she started sleeping with Dr. Butt. You have to understand these men. These are the kind of men who used to come to me when internet first came and they began to watch porn, and said things like, Our wives don’t fuck like that. The idea of a young woman just following her desires to whatever ends and goals she sees fits turned them on like nothing could have. Now I know what you’re thinking. The woman in this story is just a sex object that these horny men pass around like a toy. She has no voice, no agency. Maybe that’s the case. Maybe as the story progresses you like me will come to the conclusion that she is the only one with agency and so what if she is quiet in the narration, I’m getting it from her lovers, that’s the kind of story this is, and then should I not tell the story? And if by chance a fine writer like you should write about my dead friend, perhaps she can be awakened and given a voice. And now you will say it’s not your job to speak for her, she can speak very well for herself. Well, touche. I am going to finish this story anyway, and it’s only your company which has made me so self conscious of these kinds of considerations. I think a good story is just a good story. Period.

Please continue, I said.

So she starts living with Dr. Butt. The poet begins to pine for her, writes some of his best work. Turns out someone tips off Mrs. Butt and she calls her son-in-law who works for the ISI. He puts a few agents on Dr. Butt and before you know it his phone is getting tapped, his car is wired, and the recordings are being transcribed and delivered to Mrs. Butt. How efficient our agencies can be sometimes, no? Dr. Butt comes home one day and Mrs. Butt sits in the living room with the entire family, the evidence laid out on the table. Dr. Butt says, If you all give me one night, I will satisfy everyone. He manages to get out of there, and the next morning he gets a nikahnama, and marries Natasha. This is how easily a man can manage such affairs. Suddenly the agency men are no longer comfortable spying on Dr. Butt. Perhaps the son-in-law himself pulls them off. The wife, too, after a period of recriminations, makes peace with it. Now Natasha lives in the University housing with Dr. Butt. I’ll take you to meet her some day if you like. We are good friends, she messages me sometimes to reminisce about the old days. I think there could be something there.

The last time I saw her was at Dr. Butt’s burial. I drove her. The first wife was not there. It was a cool afternoon. The gravedigger was smoking a cigarette against the wall. A young nephew of the deceased was reciting surahs. Burials are a young people’s game. So we stood back in one corner, Natasha holding my hand, she wore a white shawl around her head and face so I could only see her eyes and they were distant, no feeling there. But she has such delicate hands and despite the somber atmosphere, I could not stop thinking about how nice it felt to stand next to Natasha.

It was what Dr. Babar said at the very end that I remembered. He said sometimes he scrolls through Natasha’s social media accounts and looks at her pictures from ten years ago when she was a student at the university recently arrived from a small nameless village near Chichawatni. Scrawny, sallow-complexion, a sour look on her face, eyes that seemed to squint as if in suspicion, picture after picture the same. Someone who carried her poverty or whatever it is that breaks men and women at a young age, whatever it is that takes hope out of them. And he scrolls down her timeline, he sees the changes prosperity has brought in her. More beautiful every year, a certain delicate expression beginning to form on her mouth, whether practiced and carefully cultivated or just another byproduct of a good life. If she was beautiful four years ago when I last saw her, Dr. Babar said, she is breathtaking now. Better makeup, a body finely tuned through exercise. And it’s her mind too: she posts long anecdotes about her day and her voice brims with kindness and sorrow and a yearning that only comes to those seekers, those certain personalities tuned to the world. She recounts her walk past the lily pads in the lake, names the trees on campus, recounts her meetings with activists. She is useful there in the university like I could never be or Dr. Butt never was. But most importantly, she is happy. I think she is the only happy person I know and I don’t even know her. So what do you say about that?

Then Dr. Babar grew quiet and he seemed to have fallen in one of his moods or perhaps the sound of the lawnmower which had come nearer and nearer had finally begun to bother him, something I worried about throughout the time he spoke. I suggested we sit in the drawing room and began to put my shirt on.

In the pale moonlight I stare at the stains on the pavement. Bright red. Blood stains or paan stains? Both come from the body. Shah Hussain walked here with Madho Lal. I think of Dr. Butt and Natasha being recorded by ISI agents. The letter chronicling the poet’s sleeping arrangements. The mob trying to catch Shah Hussain and Madho Lal in their beds. Was it all about sex? I don’t think so. Walking never tires me. By the time I find myself back on the main road where my car is still parked by the curb, it is four am. I push my key in the ignition and wait for the window to clear up. In prison, Omar Mukhtar said to me, My mother doesn’t deserve it and I know I don’t deserve it. I never said anything that was offensive and if I did, I cannot take it back. I am a man first, you must see that. And I am a son, a poet, a citizen, but first I am a man. They have done things to me, said things about me, taken my freedom, but they know I am a man still. If I say sorry, if I get released because I say tomorrow, I didn’t mean what I said, or I said it by mistake, or that I didn’t understand things then as I do now. Then I would not be a man. I would be something else. My mother understands this though she suffers. I want you to see it like that.

I don’t think Omar Mukhtar was happy in prison, and I am not sure if Shah Hussain was happy after falling in love with a young boy and upending his life, and I certainly don’t know about Natasha. I am not even sure I understand Dr. Babar’s story, laced with that familiar and antiquated misogyny, something I have stopped pointing out to Dr. Babar. I don’t think he can change in this matter and I am not one to judge; I have my own problems. If we cannot be kind to each other, of this much I am certain, then this world is a very strange and difficult place to live. Dr. Babar is a good man and he has been a friend to me, at a time when I needed a friend. I have no problems with his stories anymore.

When I reach the Mall Road, the street lights are turned on, and I see the occasional constable sitting in a car. I watch the figures asleep on the greenbelt by the Governor House. The hallway of the room where I met Omar Mukhtar reeked of decaying bananas. A sweet and unforgettable odor. He looked sideways from time to time as if waiting for someone throughout the time we spoke. The Governor is probably asleep. This Governor knows not to speak in favor of people accused of blasphemy. Omar Mukhtar will probably stay in jail for a long time, I think.

On the drive back from the prison, Dr. Babar and I discussed the matter of Omar Mukhtar. I said that such needless cruelty from the State in a matter like this was not tenable. The State needs to be kinder, I said. Dr. Babar said, You misunderstand this encounter between the State and Omar Mukhtar completely. You have lived abroad too long. He often said this last thing to me and in a tone neither condescending nor demeaning.

What am I missing here?

The State is being kind to those it cares about, those who want him punished. It’s Omar Mukhtar who failed to understand how to function under a State like this, to recognize the boundaries well established around such discourse. I am not sure what he was after, but it was madness primarily that landed him in prison.

You mean principles?

No, I said madness. I have principles too, but you don’t show the middle finger to an armed lunatic.

And that’s the State? Now that’s blasphemy.

I am only saying Omar Mukhtar could have survived, and he should have survived and finished his dissertation without this whole dog and pony show being needed. Leave religion alone and they leave you alone. Those are the rules. Why did he feel like he needed to engage? He was a fool.

Like a Shakespearian fool?

A strain of condescension had crept into my tone. Dr. Babar stared at me. Then I decided to let the matter rest.

Past the Governor House, I look at the familiar landmarks of my childhood. Ferozsons Bookshop, Pearl Continental Hotel, Dandy’s Tailors, Aitchison College, Lahore Zoo. I turn at the canal and pull my window down. I almost expect someone to be swimming in the canal. Perhaps I expect someone to be drowning. But it is quiet. There are no cars here. At the Ferozpur Road, I see the Rescue 1122 Office. Two ambulances idle outside. A man smokes a cigarette at the gate. He wears plain clothes and a frown on his face. He stares back at me. The Daewoo Bus Stop is quieter than I’ve ever seen it. Two women stand together looking at their phones. A couple of rickshaws are parked at the curb. The security guard sits and reads the newspaper in the bulb light.

I think about Dr. Babar, teaching literature in Lahore decade after decade, always looking over his shoulder. One step away from trouble. He is practical about these matters. Will I become like him if I continue to live in Lahore? Or will I be a fool? On the Shabbir Sharif road, all the lights are still turned on. For some reason, I feel afraid all of a sudden. Then I realize I have done nothing yet. Thoughts are not crimes. Not the thoughts you have in the middle of the night all alone on a deserted road. I wait for the signal to turn green. The Safe City cameras are trained on my car.

At my house, I park the car in the garage and lock the gate from inside. Then I remain standing in the lawn, waiting, listening. My heart is racing. And right then, I feel certain that nothing will calm it down as long as I remain in the country.

Munib Khan holds an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. His fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, The Normal School, Barcelona Review, Southword: New International Writing, and elsewhere. His essays have appeared in The News and Dawn in Pakistan. He has received fellowships from the National Society of Arts and Letters, Key West Literary Seminar, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. He lives in Lahore and is currently working on his debut novel.