→ 2012 Map Literary Nonfiction Prize ←
ABDUL
for my Abbu
As a professor of multiethnic American literature, I often teach the writings of immigrant authors. We ponder what it means to speak of “home” and belonging, and their opposites: homelessness, exile, and the experience of displacement so layered that people can spend their lifetimes unpeeling, unfolding, and repackaging it.
In my family, the layers of displacement are multigenerational: my grandparents’ post-1947 migration from Bihar, India, to the port city of Karachi in the new Muslim state of Pakistan, followed by their move from East Pakistan before it became Bangladesh in a second bloody secession. My parents and their siblings chased after the red balloons of their dreams in Sindh and Punjab, in Denmark, Nigeria, and Malawi, and in suburban London, heart of the former empire that had, for better or worse, held their families together. As young adults, my own siblings and I scattered to different parts of the New World in the 1980s, while the puritanic General Zia-ul-Haq, with dark shadows beneath his eyes, took hold of Pakistan as a toddler might grab a wind-up toy, and reset it on an Islamist course.
But these family histories of migrations and the search for belonging are easy to recount. The story that never makes it into the classroom centers on a man who was family but not family, dependable and dependent, central to our lives yet inhabiting its peripheries. Present, but irrelevant to me.
Abdul had been working in our extended family in Karachi long before I was born. If he had a family name, I never asked what it was, and nobody seemed to know his early history. Family lore has it that an uncle of my father’s discovered Abdul as a young man working in Karachi’s Nigaar Hotel shortly after Partition. Detecting the rhythms of his own birthplace in Abdul’s singsong Bihari accent, my great-uncle offered him domestic employment, and Abdul exchanged his life among Karachi go-getters for the promise of room and board with fellow Bihari immigrants. A self-respecting but ultimately willing heirloom, Abdul served in this or that branch of the family as our vagaries dictated. Each time prospects overseas lured employers like my parents away from Pakistan, Abdul adapted to new masters and mistresses, new working conditions, new rules, new beds.
Shortly after my parents’ marriage in Lalmonirhat (in present-day Bangladesh), my mother left her family to join my father in Karachi, over a thousand miles away. Here he lived with his sister Anwari and her husband Izhar, in the appropriately named neighborhood of Bihar Colony. Built by post-Partition immigrants and refugees on land assigned to them as compensation for their losses in India, Bihar Colony’s most salient characteristic was the foul smell that emanated from its neighboring tanneries. By the time my mother arrived there in 1962, it boasted electricity but no gas, running water, drainage or sewage system. The inhabitants relieved themselves in collective chamber-pots of sorts in their backyards. Each household would wait for the jamadaar to carry the pot out, empty it who-knows-where, and bring it back to resume its function in the backyard. When I arrived, my mother washed my cotton diapers in water delivered to the house in sheepskin mashak sacks.
Abdul had a place in my father’s Bihar Colony home long before my mother did. He had been working there back when my father and aunt lived with two other brothers, Idris and Ilyas, the siblings ranging in age from teens to early twenties. Their parents no longer alive, their grandmother cast a caring eye over them in this new land of Pakistan, where they had arrived on separate trains, with different destinies. They lived together: five members of a family, who had left ancestral lands in India on the strength of a religious ideal–and Abdul, who had left the same patch of India for his own reasons. Their Bihar Colony home saw my uncle Idris’s marriage, the birth of his first two sons, and his subsequent employment in the Ministry of Labor in Islamabad; it saw my uncle Ilyas’s departure for school in Copenhagen and accountancy in London, and my great-grandmother’s death from lung cancer. It also saw the marriages of my aunt and my father and became home to their spouses. Through these years, Abdul occupied a room outside in the courtyard. When my mother joined the family, Abdul welcomed the new bride but shooed her out of the kitchen, making it clear—much to my mother’s relief—that cooking was his turf.
Bihar Colony kept my father and his sister together until I was fifteen months old, at which point my parents, with Abdul and me in tow, moved to an apartment near the zoo. Gandhi Garden—one of the few Karachi neighborhoods whose name still preserves its pre-Partition memory—became my brother Amir’s first home. My aunt (“Phupijaan”) and her husband settled into faculty housing at Karachi University, where my uncle taught Library Science. Abdul joined them there when my parents moved to England.
Though Abdul had held me as a baby and maneuvered my stroller happily on the unpaved roads of my first neighborhood, I have no memory of him before the age of seven. We had just returned from England, where my father obtained his graduate degree in physics and my mother trained as an elementary-school teacher. In the initial months of what turned out to be a two-year sojourn, we were staying with Phupijaan and her growing family. I would see Abdul busy in the kitchen of their campus home. He was dark and gaunt, and even in this early memory, he has gray hair and a permanent stubble. Back then, he also wore a permanent frown, along with a cotton loongi wrapped around his thin hips and legs. Though he lived in the house, I don’t remember where he slept. He was sullen and mysterious, and I felt a little scared of his scowl.
When my parents’ attempt to re-root us in Karachi failed, we returned to England, now with my baby sister Sadia. There I remember hearing that a change in Pakistani currency had rendered all of Abdul’s savings, stashed away in secretive pockets, obsolete. He had had only one ambition: to travel to India and revisit the birthplace he had left behind in his youth. But having lost his savings to an economic whim of the state’s, he never spoke of going back to India again.
A couple of years later, my parents ended their second stint in England, determined to make Karachi home again, and eventually Abdul circuited back to us. We now lived in a relatively new, middle-class suburb named after Iqbal, the poet who had dreamed up Pakistan. Our family of five occupied the second level, sharing two bedrooms, while my mother’s preschool claimed the downstairs. The balcony overlooking our street served as Abdul’s bedroom. He refused to sleep on a mattress and preferred a traditional charpai bed instead: crisscrossing ropes like a hammock, held tightly together by a rectangular wooden frame on legs. My father installed a wall fan directly above Abdul’s bed and a thick awning that provided shade on summer afternoons. In the winter, it served as a buffer from the cold when Karachi Decembers forgot their accustomed gentleness. Abdul kept a small tin trunk under his charpai that contained everything he owned, including gifts of new clothes from us that remained new because he never wore them. Throughout my young adulthood in Karachi and my long years as a graduate student in Boston, our balcony served as Abdul’s home. My father eventually built him a room of his own, in the part of our backyard where a fig tree once thrived, but my memory of Abdul binds itself to the balcony.
When Abdul wasn’t chopping onions and simmering meat curries in our cubicle of a kitchen, or making his way to Kamraan Market for some need of the household, he liked to look out from the balcony. He had an astonishing way of lying on his charpai with head raised seven or eight inches off the pillow, hands clasped behind the thin stem of his neck, and knees bent, as though in imminent readiness to do sit-ups. Holding that posture for hours, he could see the level rooftops of the single-story homes on our street, neighbors walking up the stairs to their roofs to catch the cool evening breeze, gift of the Arabian Sea. He looked down on the passersby: mothers rushing their children between the marketplace at one end of the street and Maymar Apartments at the other; men as old as he making their bent and patient way to the Masjid-e-Noor, or Mosque of Light. (Though my father walked to the mosque five times a day in response to the muazzin’s calls for prayer, Abdul chose to accompany him only once a year for the holiday prayer at Eid.) Looking, Abdul saw Allah’s business meld with the business of Kamraan Market. Butchers feathered dead chickens while the live ones looked on; the mound of amber mangoes glowed on the fruitseller’s cart, and children lined up at Mister Book, clamoring for the brightly colored stationery in protective plastic sheaths that gleamed with Karachi’s dust.
Now and then, Abdul went to the barber’s. He would study his hollow cheeks and deeply lined face in a hand-mirror while the barber’s radio played “filmi” songs loud enough for the entire neighborhood to sing along. Abdul would return from these visits cropped and clean-shaven, and maybe even inclined to take a shower. Nobody knew why he was so averse to showering, but my parents, like all of Abdul’s employers before them, seemed to have long relinquished any attempts to coax or coerce him into it.
Some mornings Abdul would come in from the balcony flashing a big grin at my father. One hand raised and fingers spread, he’d swivel his wrist from left to right in the time-honored South Asian gesture of negation and announce: “I’m not working today.” Sometimes he volunteered that he was going to his old stomping grounds in downtown Saddar to see a movie—Urdu or English, it didn’t much matter because he couldn’t hear very well anyway. On these occasions, Abdul would be dressed in his tin-trunk best, unaccustomed black shoes polished to perfection. He would then retrieve several of the rupees saved from his monthly salary. My father made a point of paying him in crisp new bills, knowing that Abdul prized cleanliness in cash, if not in his person, and Abdul would tuck these bills into a cloth pouch. Over the years, he constructed many such pouches, stitching each addition onto the long cloth belt that held the independent units together. (After Abdul’s death, my father would discover this uniquely designed belt of monied pouches among the contents of Abdul’s tin trunk. The ten-rupee bills had become obsolete, but the rest of the crisp currency was good enough to form a substantial donation to local charities and a madrassa.) Ready for his day about town, Abdul would pocket the bills, hail a rickshaw—no lowly public buses for him!—and be off. Though we worried that he might get lost, Abdul always found his way home at the end of the day.
Oblivious of the world as Abdul seemed to be, he surprised us occasionally with his grasp of social conventions. One afternoon teenaged Sadia, outfitted in spandex, exercised in the family room when my uncle Ilyas happened to visit. Just as he was about to enter through the side door, Abdul rushed towards it and promptly slammed the door in my uncle’s face. At the time, his sense of propriety amused us. It is only now that I realize the full implications of that gesture: not only did Abdul seek to protect my sister’s modesty like an old-time gallant, but the slamming revealed that he considered himself more of an insider to our family than the uncle we saw as our second father.
Today, as I try to recall Abdul’s passions—with a curiosity I lacked when we lived under the same roof—three things emerge in sharp relief: television soaps, tea, and cigarettes.
Abdul loved to watch the latest TV “drama serial” with us. While we planted ourselves on the couches and armchairs, Abdul rooted himself to the floor, some three feet away from the television screen. From time to time, he would interrupt the show to ask if the beautiful woman on the screen was our acquaintance Miss So-and-So. He surprised us with his comparisons to long-departed relatives, or to people my parents had known years ago in other neighborhoods. Occasionally, he would point to a handsome young man in a romantic scene and tell us shyly, through a toothfree smile: “See that man? That’s me.”
But my greatest connection with Abdul centered on our common love of strong, hot tea, no matter how warm the day. He would come in from the balcony and, eyes shining brightly, ask: “Should I make some chai?” Most of the time I said yes because I wanted it, and sometimes I said yes so he could justify making himself a cup. He would make his way to the kitchen and put his favored kettle on the stove. It was a small, aluminum kettle with a handle that was neither heat-resistant nor firmly attached to the body of the container and a lid that had an independent life, falling out entirely if you poured at too steep an angle. The kettle wavered threateningly as you guided boiling hot water out of its spout and at the same time tried to keep the lid from unleashing its scalding breath on your hand. Abdul, who dismissed any glossy whistling kettles that my mother or I might have tried to foist upon him, would grasp the overheated handle with one of his many rags, his thin, unsteady hand dangling the kettle over the teapot. Loose Lipton tea leaves awaited as he poured the hot water into the teapot and placed an embroidered tea cozy over it to keep it warm–even if he himself was sweltering. While the tea steeped, he would heat the buffalo milk my father had purchased from the neighboring farm that very dawn. Then out came the mismatched china cups, into which Abdul would pour the rich, aromatic tea through a strainer. If it caught the light while he poured, the tea would glitter like a garnet waterfall. Then Abdul would plop milk and sugar into each cup to suit his own taste. He often carried several cups of tea as they chattered with their companion saucers on a tray, an ensemble that made its way tremblingly to the living room.
Abdul made many, many cups of tea—for my parents, for our guests, for his friend Bakhshu, the chapraasi messenger at Urdu Science College where my father served as chair of the Physics Department, and for me when I tried desperately to stay awake and study for my next exam or soothe one of my signature sore throats. In the days after my father came home from the Cardiovascular Hospital, Abdul made twenty or thirty cups of tea a day for the colleagues and relatives who came to see him. Only once in a long while, if Abdul lay sick on his charpai, staging a prolonged hunger strike, did I make a cup of tea for him and bring it to the balcony.
Abdul’s third passion, for cigarettes, was as non-negotiable as his aversion to showers. He welcomed the minty Marlboros I brought him on visits home from Boston and savored what he described as the cool, cool sensation of puffing on them. But it was the beeri that commanded his undying loyalty. Beeri, the poor man’s cigarette throughout South Asia, shaped by the hands of rural women and children. Abdul’s beeris were dry tobacco leaves rolled to resemble a cone. Deadly as any smoke, and Abdul loved them. For me, the beeri ignites a memory that I’d rather not claim.
It was a few years into graduate school that I took a year’s leave and returned to Karachi. I had walked out of a relationship of many years, wanted to flee the new one emerging on the horizon, and had begun to question my doctoral ambitions. I believed then, as I do now, that when we’re uncertain of the road ahead, the wisest course is to trace our steps back home and stay until we find our bearings again. My home in Karachi had contracted: my siblings, too, had flitted off to academic destinations in the U.S., and while the preschool still occupied the lower level of our home, my mother herself had moved out. My father had retired from Urdu Science College as much-loved principal of fourteen years, and he and Abdul were now the only individuals still together—two lonely men, whose separate destinies anchored in one home.
I returned from Boston to find that Abdul had taken to smoking his beeris in our poorly ventilated kitchen, rather than on the balcony.
“Abdul, please smoke outside,” I’d say. Abdul would nod, and maybe head for the balcony, and maybe not. In any case, he’d be puffing away on his beeri again another day. I was young and wounded, smarting from my own sense of powerlessness as a woman, and uncertain of my place in the world. One afternoon, the simmering resentment caught fire.
Studying from hefty anthologies of American and British literature for the oral exam I planned to take upon my return to Boston, I could smell the air, suddenly grown pungent, as it wafted into my bedroom. This time, I set my three-inch tome aside and marched towards the kitchen, a woman with a mission. I could feel the heat rising to my face like a fiery tidal wave, my heart thumping. Abdul was standing very still in the kitchen, his gaze fixed on some faraway vision beyond the window-screen, a beeri lodged in his long, dark fingers. He stood enveloped in its smoke and in the haze of his own thoughts. Though I used the politer second-person aap to address him, my voice grew shrill and unfamiliar to my own ears.
“How many times have I asked you not to smoke in the kitchen, Abdul? How many times?” I demanded. “But you just won’t listen, will you? If you don’t give a damn about your own health, you have no right to make the rest of us sick with that smoke!”
My voice trembled uncontrollably, like Abdul’s hands when they carried teacups, and startled him out of his reverie. Dark clouds began to gather on his face, and for a moment he looked like the frightening figure of my childhood. Wrist swiveling and voice quivering with pain, he exclaimed: “Is this not my home, then? Is this not my home?”
And with that, he walked out of the kitchen with his beeri, towards the balcony.
I had wrung the question from his heart, the question that undergirded the flux of all the years. More cry than question, it reverberated with the faraway sound of Abdul’s sandaled footsteps as he wandered, a young man, from India to Pakistan, Bihar to Karachi; from one home to the next, until those feet came to rest on our balcony.
Next thing I knew, Abdul was rummaging in his tin trunk, to return from the balcony a few minutes later with an armload of miscellaneous objects. He flung them onto the dining table at which I now sat, trying to assure myself that I had done the right and reasonable thing.
“Take this that you brought me!” Abdul said hoarsely. “And this—and this—and this,“ as scarves, hats, mugs, and mint Marlboros accumulated in a shamefaced heap before me. Abdul had kept these Boston tokens over the years and remembered the giver long after the purchase had been forgotten. In a flash of recognition and remorse, I pressed my palms against each other, the most visible gesture of supplication I knew.
“Forgive me, Abdul!” I pleaded–once, twice, three times—as he turned his back on me and headed out towards the balcony again.
This time I flew after him, with his tin-trunk possessions huddled awkwardly in my arms. Crying like the baby he had carted on Bihar Colony’s streets, I begged him to take them back.
Abdul relented. But if he ever smoked in the kitchen again, I have no memory of it.
I went back to Boston, took my oral exam, wrote my dissertation and defended it. I married the love I had tried to flee. I didn’t return to Karachi for almost three years, and when I did, it was to see Amma, my maternal grandmother, in the last week of her life. She died as she had lived, afloat on a memory of home, of mother and siblings left behind in Bihar, India.
A year after Amma’s death, while Phupijaan and her family were visiting from Nigeria, Abdul took ill. He had lost control of his bowels but refused to be cleaned or fed. Phupijaan’s daughters, both medical students, tried to medicate and keep him hydrated with fruit juice, but Abdul had an intractable will. His body, already frail, had whittled down to a matchstick figure. Despairing, my father considered handing Abdul over to Abdul Sattar Edhi’s shelter, internationally known for its generous care. But my mother, who lived a few miles away with her husband Shahzad, asked if she might take Abdul to stay in their apartment for a while. Abdul had neither the strength nor the desire to get up from his charpai, so Shahzad had to bundle him up in his soiled sheets and carry him down from the balcony into their car. In the apartment, Shahzad nursed and bathed Abdul back to health and returned him to my father’s house a month later, ready for tea and beeri again.
I saw Abdul for the last time a year before his death. I had used the excuse of a conference in Bangkok to make a detour to Karachi with my husband Frank. A fleeting visit, its most salient memory is not my own goodbye to Abdul, but Frank’s: after our bags had been carried downstairs to the car, all friends and family embraced and thanked, Frank turned back to the kitchen in search of Abdul, and to everyone’s surprise–especially Abdul’s–hugged his bony frame, showered or not.
And while I flapped my professional wings as an adjunct professor in Massachusetts, Abdul began to cough incessantly. Troubled, my father took him for medical tests at Civil Hospital. Abdul was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that had swooped down on my father’s ancestral village in Bihar in 1940 and claimed the lives of his young mother, his aunt, his grandfather, and his ten-year-old sister Akhtari. Now my father took Abdul to the Ojha sanatorium in Karachi. Civil Hospital had refused to let Abdul stay in the ward for fear of his infecting other patients.
Though my father had been able to get Abdul a place at Ojha sanatorium thanks to his contacts, he wasn’t able to keep him there. At first, the nurses complained that Abdul refused medication. My mother offered to attend to Abdul but was told that women couldn’t stay in the male ward. Then my father hired a personal attendant for him, but the man, terrified of TB, avoided Abdul and spent his time outside on the grass. Eventually, the administrator declared that since Abdul’s tuberculosis was at an incurable stage anyway, his bed would be better occupied by a patient whom they had some hope of saving. Abdul could last for weeks or months in this condition, he said, and offered to write a letter recommending his admission to Edhi’s shelter.
Where was my father to take Abdul now? He didn’t have the physical strength to take care of him in protracted illness, my siblings and I couldn’t extricate ourselves from our American lives long enough to come and help, and nobody would nurse an obstinate patient like Abdul for money. My father knew that instead of bringing him back to the house, he would have to deliver him to Edhi’s. They accepted the recommendation from Ojha sanatorium but said that they would find a place for Abdul not at the shelter close to our house but at Edhi Home, their larger facility for charitable longterm care. My mother wanted to check the place out before Abdul was sent there, so together my parents—failed spouses but the most reliable of friends–made the excursion to the outskirts of Karachi on the Super Highway.
Edhi Home struck them as a beautiful space—far from the urban fray, green and open. The long hall held a line of real mattresses, covered in clean linen. My parents spoke to one of the residents, an older man, who turned out to be garrulous in both Urdu and English.
“My daughters-in-law wouldn’t have me, so I live here,” he said. “Where else do you get a free half-pao of mutton to eat every day?”
In a voice knifed with pain, my father tells of the morning he went to discharge Abdul from Ojha sanatorium and help him into the ambulance that would take him to Edhi’s. The moment Abdul saw that my father had come to get him out of the sanatorium, his eyes shone with the prospect of home. With sudden energy and a smile that displayed only gums, Abdul sprang from the hospital bed, gathered his meager belongings, and with a child’s trusting joy, got into the ambulance.
The ambulance drove away, and my father wept.
Nobody could have known that Abdul would die within four days—that the first two of those days, Abdul would lie in a transitional space, crowded and impersonal, waiting for Edhi Home to make room for him. By all accounts, he died on one of the comfortable floor- mattresses in the serene and bright hall, a garden beckoning from outside.
When Edhi officials called to inform my father of Abdul’s death, he went to identify Abdul’s body at the mortuary, accompanied by his closest friend and by my mother’s husband. The three men walked together through the giant deep-freeze, bodies laid out on the floor as well as on shelves in the walls. They peered into one lifeless face after another, until they found Abdul’s. Then a kindly official told my father that Abdul’s body had been washed and shrouded, and asked him whether he would like Edhi Home to take care of the burial. My father conferred with his friends, who advised that in light of his own frail health and Abdul’s solitary life, it would be best to let the hospice arrange the burial.
“What time will you schedule Abdul’s Janaaza prayer?” my father asked the Edhi offical. “I would like to be there for the funeral.”
He was told that the burial would take place not in Karachi but in Hub, on the road to the Baluchi capital Quetta. Their policy, the official said, was to wait a few days until they had accumulated enough bodies for a collective funeral. The prospect of a delayed and less-than-individualized funeral appalled my father. Though he worried that few people would show up for Abdul’s last rites, he chose to bring him home.
Since Edhi’s practice was to bathe the dead using a garden hose, my father repeated the entire ritual of the final ablution at home, in accordance with Muslim custom. Masjid-e-Noor provided the low wooden bed or takht for the purpose, as it had for Amma, my grandmother. In the backyard of our house, near Abdul’s room, my father, my mother’s husband Shahzad, and two neighbors lay Abdul’s body on the takht. They warm the water and scent it with leaves of the purifying neem tree. Then they proceed to bathe the body, each gesture sacred. Strong, gentle hands wrap Abdul in a white shroud and set him down in the living room, cleaner than he had cared to be most days of his life. My mother views him there, his eyes slightly open as though suspended in a private dream. Then the men shoulder the cloud-light coffin and carry it to Masjid-e-Noor, my father leading the way as Abdul’s next of kin.
And so, on a temperate day in February 1999, Abdul left our home for the last time, some fifty years after he first arrived in the family. The Imam led the Janaaza service within sight of Abdul’s balcony. Shopkeepers in Kamraan Market had pulled their shutters down to join in the communal prayer for Abdul’s final journey. In fact, the neighborhood had turned out in such numbers that the bus hired for the cemetery had no space to spare.
My father, with the busload of neighbors, carried Abdul’s body to Haseenabad Cemetery, the same place where he and other men from our family had taken Amma three years earlier. Abdul lies somewhere near my grandmother, in a traditionally unmarked grave like hers, layers of Karachi earth smoothed over their Bihari dusts.
ABDUL
Samina Najmi teaches multiethnic U.S. literature at California State
University, Fresno. She has written scholarly articles on race, gender, and war in American literature and edited or coedited three books. A late bloomer, she discovered the rewards of memoir in 2011 when she stumbled into a CSU Summer Arts course that taught her to see. Samina was raised in Pakistan and England, and now thrives among citrus and fig trees in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
