Children of Dust Read Online Free PDF Page A

gathering of Muslims in the world. It was called Ijtema .
    “Get on the bike, shabash ,” Pops said one morning. “We’re going to Raiwand.”
    I sat on the motorcycle and wrapped a checkered scarf around my mouth to protect against the dust. On the Suzuki we sped past the slums that surrounded Lahore. Soon we were on a flat highway cutting through fields of barley. A multicolored bus with mirror-work and murals on its exterior passed by. Outside of a small town we stopped to help an old peasant with a donkey cart. His lord had heaped too much weight on the cart before sending the peasant off, and the donkey kept getting tipped into the air.
    Nothing could have prepared me for Raiwand’s immensity. There were thousands of tents on a burning-hot white plain. Countless men in shalwar kameez and beards, most carrying backpacks, walked around greeting one another. Vials of musk, tasbih beads, and tapes of religious instruction were on sale. I saw Mongolian men and Caucasian men and African men. There was considerable discussion among them about the possibility that Nawaz Sharif, General Zia ul Haq’s favorite politician (and a future prime minister of Pakistan), would be coming in by helicopter.
    I was marched endlessly around the plain as Pops searched for Dada Abu and Tau. He eventually found them standing around in a large circle of men who had also come up from Dada Abu’s village, and there were loud introductions all around.
    Dada Abu pinched my cheeks. Tau went to his stuff and pulled out one of the backpacks he had sewn at his workshop; he threw it around my shoulders.
    Dada Abu and Pops stepped away from the group, me tagging at their heels, and discussed Pops’s practice. Dada Abu was trying to convince Pops to forget Lahore and move back to the desert where he had grown up (and where Dada Abu still lived) and start afresh. They talked in hushed whispers for a little while; then Pops grabbed my wrist angrily and we rode back home. Pops was upset about something and drove so fast that we flew into a ditch. After that we had to limp home, pushing the motorcycle along.
    Over dinner Pops told Ammi what Dada Abu had suggested, and she also dismissed the idea. Schools were better in Lahore, she pointed out, and there was more opportunity there even if expenses weregreater. However, a few days later, Lahore made the decision for us. A local businessman who was friendly with Nawaz Sharif sent his thugs to our apartment building and informed the landlord that they were going to come back in a week’s time and knock the building down. It would behoove the tenants to go quietly, they warned. By the time a gang of university students, Nawaz Sharif’s supporters, came to the neighborhood and rocked the buildings until the structures collapsed with a groan, we had wrapped up our things in knotted bedsheets and were at the train station.

6
    T he Prophet Sulayman, son of Daud, King of the Jews, controlled the elements, spoke to animals, and commanded the jinn . He traveled across the world on a throne made from a diamond so flawless that before the Queen of Sheba stepped upon it, she hiked up her dress, thinking she was about to step in a pool of water. One day Sulayman’s aerial adventures took him to a great mountain at the easternmost edge of the Iranian plateau. He looked across South Asia but found it covered in darkness; then he turned toward Jerusalem. That mountain where he stopped, later known as Takht-e-Sulayman, sits in what is now the arid desert of central Pakistan, west of the mighty Indus. In that desert, my father’s family lived in Sehra Kush, a tired town surrounded by sand dunes. *
    We had no throne. We took third-class rail to get there.
    On the multi-day trip we occupied a window seat and a sleeping berth. We rode with migrant workers smelling of soil who slept with their turbans pulled over their eyes. Those who couldn’t snare a seat were comfortable sleeping in front of the train’s pungent latrine