Children of Dust Read Online Free PDF

and in the aisles, apparently unconcerned about being stepped upon by barefoot passengers coming in from the muddy fields. Men brought aboardeverything from bicycles, to a line of women in veils, to lambs and goats—along with a wide range of similar life essentials—minding them with a dismissive nonchalance. The atmosphere in the train was jovial. Chai flowed freely; roasted nuts, poured out into paper cups, were omnipresent. The predominantly good-natured conversation was punctuated by laughter, and there were many jokes about politicians and their corrupt char so beesi . There was occasional yelling as well, especially whenever a shepherd led his bearded goats onto the train track ahead of us and caused a delay. A delay was usually considered deplorable only if it was overnight, however; even then, if it was a precautionary stop in order to avoid an ambush by dakooz, it was shrugged off with a casual reference to Allah’s ownership of the universe (followed by a stream of profanities about the incestuous anal activities of the armed degenerates). When there was a woman discovered to be traveling all by herself, she was shuttled off to some other part of the train, where a coterie of hefty matriarchs who had heard about “the poor creature” yelled at their men for not showing more initiative in bringing the vigorous jawan girl under their protective umbrella.
    A few nights after leaving Lahore we came upon a deserted train station and switched to a midnight lorry that would take us over unpaved roads the rest of the way. Because we had a woman with us, Flim and I were put in the front, while numerous men—Pops among them—jammed themselves into the back.
    I looked out the window at the station we’d left behind and in a cloud of dust saw a pair of men running at the moving lorry, holding their sacks with one hand and their falling lungi s—a traditional Punjabi sarong—with the other, cursing at the driver in a language I didn’t understand.
    They shone with a blue luminescence that made me wonder if they were angels.
     
    U nlike Lahore, where the immensity of history forced hierarchy to become subtle in manifesting itself, Sehra Kush felt no qualms about segregation. The town was bisected by a highway that did the job.
    The lower portion of the town, in the shape of a polygon, was for the administrators, judges, civil servants, and military men, all of whom lived in bungalows inside compounds marked by streets of the blackest asphalt, manicured lawns complete with imported trees, and an order epitomized by security guards and regular trash pickup (with refuse sometimes dumped onto empty plots on the other side of the city). The central institution of this section: the clubhouse; the popular mode of transport: unmarked car; the favored type of violence: against servants.
    There was a larger upper portion of the city expanding like a heinous goiter. It belonged to bazari s with their stalls, traders, cart- wala s, maulvi s on their way to teach at the mosque, and mendicants. Most of these people lived in mud houses lined up haphazardly on streets of dust marked by trash, open sewage, and the furry green droppings of low-breed donkeys. The central institution of this section: the mosque; the popular mode of transportation: the horse-drawn tanga; the favorite type of violence: insult. This is where we were headed.
    We arrived in Sehra Kush on a hazy morning and took two tanga s to Dada Abu’s house. After clop-clopping on a highway for a while, we turned onto a badly paved road and passed an empty field full of trash where a pair of wide-horned black buffaloes—whose milk was sold to the neighboring families—swished their tails. We then took a turn into an unpaved alley, passing open gutters leaking witch blackness onto the street. Homes were on both sides of the alley, set off from the narrow street by a foot-wide gap for the nali , the open sewer, which flowed in a slow froth full of everything from stones,