Children of Dust Read Online Free PDF Page B

to phlegm, to animal dung, with light-brown dollops of human feces bobbing to the surface. Each house had a thick wooden plank that bridged the nali . The doors on the houses were all flung open, although there was a heavy curtain in each doorway that assured privacy for the women within.
    When our tanga s made their way into the alley, children ran toward us from each side. They yelled greetings and stuck sticks into the churning spokes, picking up another stick whenever a grinding wheel snapped a spear and nearly took a child’s hand along with it. Soon we came to a dilapidated Land Rover from the mid-1950s that was parked in the middle of the alley. (We later learned that it belonged to the Balochi neighbors.) The tanga drivers, clicking their tongues at theirhorses as they reversed, cursed at the ungainly car for blocking the thoroughfare. The horses took short, unsteady steps backward during this process, and the heads of the animals swayed from side to side as if they were intoxicated mystics.
    Dada Abu’s house, constructed from a mixture of mud, hay, rope, and wooden beams, was airy but not big. He lived there with Dadi Ma and four of my uncles and their families. The house had a courtyard, a kitchen, a cemented area for the hand-operated nalka that supplied the water, a tiny latrine with an unpaved hole in the ground, a sitting room, two bedrooms with shuttered windows, and an open staircase going to the roof. On warm nights people slept on the roof; on cooler nights in the courtyard. In the desert it never got cold enough to require sleeping inside.
    As this host of relatives greeted my brother and me with pats on the head and pinches to the cheeks, I took a look at the cramped quarters and realized that we had moved in as well.

7
    W hy bother? I’m just ugly and old!”
    Dadi Ma was fond of saying this to people who told her to cover her face when she went for her great walks around town. She was a small woman with a gold tooth, thin hennaed hair, and a loud voice. Although the women of Sehra Kush, when they left their compound, always wore the niqab , a full veil that covered the face, when Dadi Ma went out she preferred the comfort of a loose garment called the chador , which draped over her head and shoulders but was open at the face; she typically tied it with a ribbon under her chin.
    During the days, I spent a lot of time in Dadi Ma’s vicinity. She usually sat near the kitchen on a small charpai , or cot, giving instructions to Ammi and the aunts about what to cook for dinner, how many pinches of salt should go in the cookpot, and why the milkman needed to be thrashed for adding water and skimming the cream.
    She also told tall tales. How sleeping under a tree caused you to die from asphyxiation because the jinn s that lived in the branches sucked up all the oxygen; how the scary backward-footed churayl s were actually fallen souls seeking forgiveness for some crime they had committed; how going to a particular saint’s grave and spreading a ceremonial chador over it would lead to the expiation of one’s sins. Most of theaunts and children had already heard the stories and never asked Dadi Ma any questions, but Ammi enjoyed talking to old people and often probed her, to my great delight.
    One day they began talking about the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and Dadi Ma started telling really scary stories.
    “Five of them,” she announced, making her hand into a claw. “Five girls. Count them. One, two, three, four, five. Five girls jumped into a well. Into the same well. Just to protect their honor. This was in 1947, back when we lived in Indian Punjab. All because that Mountbatten switched the borders on the founders of our country and put us in India when we would’ve been in Pakistan.”
    “Who were the girls?” Ammi asked.
    “ Our girls! They were just girls. The virgin ones. My cousins-in-law. All single. No husbands. No children. Their whole life lay before them. What a waste!