The following is from Farah Ali’s The River, The Town. Ali grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and currently lives in London. Her work has been anthologized in the 2020 Pushcart Prize and received special mention in the 2018 Pushcart anthology. Her debut story collection People Want to Live published with McSweeney’s Books, and includes new stories and some previously published in VQR, Shenandoah, The Arkansas International, MQR, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Copper Nickel, and others.
Kawsar, Juman, and I are standing on the roof of our school, throwing small rocks at the dish antenna on top of Mohsin sahab’s bare brick house across the narrow alley. We shade our eyes from the sun and track each rock’s flight. It’s Juman’s turn and he throws one, with a sharp movement of the wrist, and it goes in. He hurls the next one too hard and it bounces off.
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“How many channels do you think he gets?” I ask. Kawsar shrugs. “Maybe ten.”
“He paid half for that thing, would you believe it,” Juman says. He lifts his shirt and wipes his face with the hem. “Charged double from everyone at the water station, said we have no idea how much tankers cost, he’s practically doing charity, paying for half of it out of his pocket. Made my father pay almost triple. A thief and a liar.”
The sun is above my head, burning my hair. Kawsar throws a rock but it is a tired attempt; the heat is draining our energy fast.
“Maybe we should just go ahead and break the dish,” Juman says. In his hand is a brick. He raises it to his shoulder.
Kawsar stands straighter, trying to look concerned about being caught and not about the act of wrong, trying to speak casually. “Come on, he’s going to find out we did it.”
For a moment he and I watch Juman, who glances at us in turn. Then he laughs and says, “You two are cowards. My most trusted friends, my jigar, are cowards.” But he lowers his arm, and Kawsar and I grin and thump Juman’s shoulder. We go down the stairs, past the classroom where children are gazing dully at the science teacher, and out through the small gate.
*
Our Town is shaped like an oval with wavy edges. At least that is what it looks like in the picture in last year’s geography book, which came for us from the City. The Town is connected to the City by a road which is some thirty kilometers long. A lot of us go there for jobs. We are construction workers, maasi, sweepers, gutter-cleaners, bus drivers, rickshaw drivers, cooks. The Town is considered part of the City but it is also not a part of it because we can do almost everything ourselves. There is a primary school here and a secondary school, a hospital, a pharmacy, though the sizes of all of these have been slowly shrinking. The only thing we really need from outside is water.
About two weeks ago, a three-year-old boy here died. He was some milkman’s son so we treated it like a small, sad, forgettable piece of news. Today, a teacher in class six fell down in a faint. The children told us her head went thump on the ground. Another teacher had to leave his class and take Mrs. Zeenat to the hospital because he also drives the school van. And the principal, an old lady with thick glasses on a sagging face, had to go with them to make sure Mrs. Zeenat didn’t end up like the milkman’s boy. After that, the teachers didn’t feel like teaching and told us school was over for the day, which is why Juman, Kawsar, and I are in the big park now.
When we were children, we used to go to the playground which has a swing set, a slide, and a merry-go-round. But now that we are older we prefer to be by the Bara Darya. The name comes from a very long time ago when the river used to be wide and deep. I have always seen it as a thin stream flowing weakly over the ground. When my friend Juman is extra hungry he says it looks like a gray intestine.
It is a warm afternoon but we run until we reach it, and then we go down the incline onto the hard, dried ground, toward the stream.
“I think Aab likes me,” Juman says.
Kawsar laughs at him. “You think everyone likes you,” he says. “She said I could copy her math work.”
We are by the water. We are running again, not talking anymore. After two kilometers or so we stop but the stream goes on. We turn around and walk, stopping to scoop water into our mouths when we are thirsty. We will try not to be thirsty at our homes, the water there is too little. This week, only one tanker has come to the Town, and the driver said each person could not take more than twenty liters.
At home is my mother, sharp and thin as a knife. She crosses her arms and asks me where I was. Her tone makes me shrink inside; I hate having the same reaction to her voice at seventeen as I had at seven.
“Just out with my friends,” I tell her.
I don’t look at her face because I know all its features will be hard and stark; her chin will be bony, her hair more gray than black. Her clothes will be the oldest clothes I have seen on anyone, even the maasi who go to clean homes. The picture of destitution. There is a slight movement, and my glance flicks up to her. She has tightened her arms and narrowed her eyes.
“Were there girls there? I’m sure that haraam zaada Juman must have arranged for you to meet some girls. Did he get you cigarettes? Or his father’s bottle to drink from?”
“It was just us, we went to the river. We didn’t do anything.”
Then my school bag slips off my shoulder and falls by my feet. I reach down to pick it up but my mother leaps forward and snatches it out of my hand. She pulls the zip and shakes the bag over the floor.
*
I hold my breath as the objects fall out: books, a pencil, a few exercise books, a ruler, a scrap of paper. What else is there? My mother puts her hand inside and pulls out a cigarette. The cigarette is from weeks ago, from an afternoon when I had tried one with Kawsar and Juman and then put the extra one in the bag, forgetting all about it.
To my mother, it is proof of everything sordid she imagines all day long. She sounds almost happy in her triumph. “You think you can hide your dirty self from me, do you? You think you are oh so big now,” and here she puts her hands on her hips and sticks out her chest and pulls a grotesque face, “Mr. Big Smoker Man with a scrawny mustache.”
I wrap my anger around my organs, protecting them. I remove from my mind any images from the afternoon when I had laughed with my friends, because that is a false me, and this is the real me, the person that I am inside this house, in front of this woman. But the longer she goes on speaking the thinner that protection gets until I fear that my rawness will start to be exposed. Abruptly, I run into my room. From a space behind my desk, I bring out the key I had gotten made in secret. With shaking hands, I lock the door.
From the other side, I can still hear my mother. “Have you seen your face in the mirror? You think that’s a mustache? You think that thing above your lips makes you a full-grown man who doesn’t have to follow his mother’s rules anymore? You’re going to be like Juman’s father, sleeping with whores from the City and drinking. That’s all you’ll be.”
There is nowhere in my room to block her sound. Just the desk with the single drawer, a small cupboard, and a narrow bed with a worn-out sheet. I pull it over my head, lying on the mattress with faded outlines of urine stains from when I was a little boy. I stay there until I hear my father come home at night.
*
When I was younger, and my father found me in bed after my mother had said or done something to send me there, he would sit for a moment by my feet and tell me, in an awkward, conciliatory way, that it wasn’t my mother’s fault. She was sad, and worried, and she had been sad and worried for a long time, so I had to try harder to be a good, thoughtful child. And, he would say, getting up, it was she who had chosen my name, my very special name, so that I would not see a day of discomfort in my life.
My mother named me Baadal because she thought a name which means cloud would keep all of us in cool shade and fresh water. But after me there came two sisters who died, one after the other. I don’t have any memory of their faces; I was only six or seven then. There is a picture of each of them in small oval frames on a little table in the living room. In them, Gulaab is three and Kanwal is one, the oldest ages they got to live. Sometimes, after crying in her room, my mother would come out and sit next to me and start talking about how hot and thirsty everyone had been in all the years that my sisters were alive, but that the summer after Kanwal passed away, it had rained very hard. And she would ask me what kind of black magic had I practiced. I learned that the best recourse was silence; if I did not answer her, she would not cry and tear at her hair, she would not wish loudly that God had taken me instead of her angelic daughters.
I remember that rain, and a gray patch that had started to grow in a corner of the living room ceiling. My father had looked at it, smiled his half smile, and said, “That to me is not an eyesore.” My mother had looked at it, sighed, and said, “What a waste, paint and plaster sucking up all that water.” The rain continued and the patch became darker and larger. My mother walked around the room, pausing to look out through the window and wring her hands, passing under the wet patch and glaring at it, clicking her tongue. I remember telling her I wanted to go outside and play in the puddles, but she said I couldn’t do that. It would be an unholy thing to do; wasting water was a sin. If I continued to plead she would become bigger and more dangerous so I sat in a corner and made paper boats. By late afternoon the rain grew more intense, needles of it striking the ground outside. Everything became dark with water—the roofs of houses, the leaves on the trees, the strips of soil on the sides of the street, the street itself. The gray patch began to drip. My mother put a bucket under it. She joined me at the window, and together we watched the rainwater form small puddles. I was extremely aware of her presence next to me, of her tense, bony form. She could so easily reach out a hand and grab me, I made her angry even when I did not speak. When she moved I took a step back, but she only went to the kitchen, fetched a pot and a teacup, and walked out of the house. Through the glass, I saw her squat in front of a puddle, scoop up water using the cup, and empty it into the pot, her hair coming lose from the bun, sticking to her face, her mouth moving as she talked to herself. I watched her for a few more seconds before running outside with my arms full of paper boats. “Baadal! Come here and help me!” I heard her say, but I kept running toward my friend’s home, my mouth open to let the water in.
The third day of that rain, it reduced to a steady drizzle. A lady from the neighborhood came by with a small plate of halwa. She gave me a five-rupee note and said, “Bless you, son.” On the fourth day my mother dragged the mattress off her bed and slept there, monitoring the bucket under the dripping ceiling. When she ran out of pots and pitchers to fill from the puddles, she came up with a system to empty them quickly and efficiently: she began washing our clothes with the rainwater. My father tried to help, but her speed and system overwhelmed him. Once, he sloshed water onto the carpet and my mother told him he was useless. She put her arm out and he stumbled. For a long time, I thought they had done a playful thing but now I know better.
*
Juman doesn’t come to school on Tuesday but that is nothing unusual; he is a casual visitor to the classroom. During break time, a boy runs over to me and Kawsar and tells us our friend Juman is being beaten up. We forget that our bags are still inside and we have half a day of school left. We run all the way to Juman’s house, the boy in the front. Men are standing in a circle, from the center of which we can hear another man’s voice, screaming, and a boy’s voice, laughing. The men part easily and Kawsar and I see Juman bent over with his arms over his head and his father holding him by the collar of his shirt with one hand and hitting him with the sole of a shoe with the other. He growls through gritted teeth, and Juman bursts into more giggles, though his face is wet. His father changes his grip on the shoe and brings down the heel upon Juman’s back.
Kawsar and I rush forward and grab him from behind, pulling him off Juman. The men, who have been watching silently until now, start saying, in tones of reason, “Come on, end this now” and “Someone get him a glass of water.” At that, I let go of Juman’s father and look around for my friend. We find him a few doors down the street, surrounded by boys from the school. He is sitting on the ground. His right eye is swollen and his lip is bleeding. A bruise is blooming over his cheek. When he sees us he grins, and we see he has a tooth missing on one side. Kawsar turns his face away for a moment and passes a hand over his eyes.
“What happened with your abba?” I ask.
Juman caresses his face. “Nothing, really. That pig Mohsin told my father I broke his dish antenna, and my father broke my face.”
“Did you?”
Juman’s smile becomes wider. “Of course.”
The teachers in our school have been in a bad mood lately because Mrs. Zeenat, the one who fainted, has gone back to the City. Our science teacher spends the lesson shaking his head and saying people like Mrs. Zeenat never completely want to belong to the Town. “How could she have,” he goes on, “when every Friday her sister or brother or someone sent her a box full of her favorite snack foods?” When the volunteer history teacher comes in, he first says, “This place isn’t for weaklings. It is not for soft people. It is not for greedy or needy or inward-looking people.” Then he tells us to take out our pens and take notes. We write and learn. Many years ago, the people in the villages of Purana Gaon, Duur Gaon, and Naya Gaon went through a terrible trial that came to be called the Great Shrinking. Bara Darya lost a lot of volume; everything important became less—food, blind dependency on something as free-flowing as water. What increased was dread, and the number of children. People migrated toward the north and settled here in the Town, where the river was still a little stronger.
There is nothing new in this for us; the stories of how people came and settled into the Town were the words we learned to speak as babies. Just like we have been taught that almost every child born here has been given a name meant to evoke a sensation of coolness, of thirst being quenched. We are a generation of leaf, rain, sea, cool breeze. We are supposed to ward off unhappiness, and live.
The history teacher, who is from the City after all, points to us and says, in an incredulous tone, “And after all the loss they had seen their own parents go through, they didn’t seem to want to stop having children. First one child, then two, then four. Birthing them and burying them, on and on and on.”
I wonder if he knows that Kawsar, whose name is a river in heaven, used to have six brothers and sisters, and the youngest one died after eight days, and then a brother, and then another.
*
My father works in a pharmacy. It is the only one in town. He is the owner’s assistant. For as long as I have known him, he has put on his light-blue striped shirt and his dark gray pants and driven off in his little car to the small, square building full of medicine. Kawsar’s father smells like soil, Juman’s father smells of cigarettes and alcohol. My father has no particular smell attached to him. He stays in the shadow of my mother, walking around thin and stoop-shouldered, not speaking much. He does not scold me about my studies, he does not give me lectures about life. After he comes home from work, he goes to the TV, turns it on, and does not move from in front of it until ten, when he gets up to go to bed. We eat our dinner with him in front of whatever he is watching, which is usually the news or a talk show. I like watching the ads. Like everything else on TV, they come from the City, and they are full of City accents and problems and affectations. I stop eating whenever they come on. They show a different world—perfumes, big families around long tables, cheeky grins on children’s shiny faces, grandfathers who are clean and glowing with health and nobleness, nobody troubled with debilitating amounts of thirst or want, nobody writhing in pain. The distance between here and the City is only the length of a road but there might as well be a sea in the middle.
Sometimes people go there and bring back gifts. A girl in my class once started coming to school with big, shiny bows in her hair; she said her aunt got them for her from a store in the City. Sometimes people go there and never return, like Juman’s uncle, who hasn’t been back to the Town in more than twelve years. Married a saali, did not even invite his sisters to the wedding. Saali was a word my friends and I learned from Juman when we were little. He said his mother had used it with her jaw clenched; he imitated it, the word coming out like a hiss. We understood it must mean something bad.
My father tells us during a break in a program: Kawsar’s father is going to have to close his grocery store.
“In all these years—fifteen to be exact—I have never been out of work,” he continues, softly, the words going up and down like a song. “Not even when I was a young man in Purana Gaon, during that most trying of times.”
“Talk about something else,” my mother says.
“We have always had something to eat. Even if it was a few pieces of bread a day.”
“Don’t say it.” My mother’s voice is as hard and brittle as a twig. “Even if it was just a cup of water. Or a potato. Or an ice cream.”
My father laughs. “Remember, Raheela, when that group sent us a refrigerated van full of ice cream? What a scramble that was. What a pushing and shoving. Muzaffar ran away with a whole liter tub of melting vanilla under his arm!”
“You’re going to bring it back. All the bad, it’s going to come back if you keep talking this way. I will not allow you to do that.” My mother’s eyes are wide and wet but not with tears, I am sure; she is not that type of person.
My father’s sound dies and he shuts his mouth. My mother turns up the volume of the TV, and the three of us move our faces toward the man on the screen.
When I was five years old, Kawsar’s uncle bought him a football from the City. We played with it for a while. I went home with dirt on the front of my shirt, on my pants, on my cheeks and hands. It was only when I saw the look on my mother’s face that I realized the condition I was in. She pulled me by my arm and hauled me back outside. She bent down and gathered a handful of soil. With her other hand she held me in place as she pushed the dirt into my mouth. Before I fainted, I saw my father’s face appear at the window then move away.
But my mother has been gentle too. I remember, after my first sister had died and the second one was in her belly, leaving the house with her one morning. We walked for a long time, then rode in a rickshaw for a long time. I remember her carrying me until we arrived at the high walls of a house. “We must be quiet or the uncle who lives inside will get very angry,” she whispered to me. Giggling, we slipped through a pair of large gates and into a green field. I had never stepped in so much grass before. I remember her hand over my eyes and then, a word from her: “Look!” In front of us was a small pond. My mother put her feet in it and told me to do the same. She spread her dupatta on the grass, sat on it, and read out loud from a book she produced from her bag. After a while, she tied one end of the dupatta around my waist and the other around her wrist. Then she lay on the grass and covered her eyes with her arm. “Don’t go too far,” she said, unnecessarily because I did not want to be far from this vision of my mother on the grass with a book. While she slept, I picked up sticks and leaves.
A year ago I had looked for that house from my memory. I found a haveli at the edge of the Town. Nobody had lived in it for some time. The padlock on the gates had rusted, then been broken by someone. I went through. Instead of grass there were dried, yellow-brown sticks here and there in clumps. I couldn’t find a pond but there was an area which could have once carried water. I stood where I thought my mother and I had stood. Nobody could have seen us from the house. I stayed there for some time, and when the afternoon became more blue and less yellow, I left.
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From The River, The Town by Farah Ali. Used with permission of the publisher, Dzanc Books. Copyright © 2023 by Farah Ali.
