“Home”

"Hey boy, you better go try somewhere else," said one of the drivers. "We're all broke."

Peering into the gloom, Mustafa saw a figure with a short torso and bent legs thin as a man's wrist, topped by enormous knees. It hopped and twisted along on strong arms, bulbous knees upright and cradled on its chest, resting between steps on a leather pad tied beneath the buttocks.

"There's someone from your part of the desert here," said the dark-skinned man with the ring. The other drivers looked over at Mustafa.

The boy lifted his head, which had been settled into the mass of his body, slowly elongating his neck, and then dragged around to Mustafa's end of the bench.

"I know you," he said cheerfully. "You're from Sandhey Khan's Village, aren't you? You drive the car of Chaudrey Abdul Ghafoor. Do you remember who I am? How can you forget, there aren't many beauties like me." He squatted down familiarly next to Mustafa and put his arms toward the fire. Of course Mustafa remembered him. The boy used to beg by the petrol station outside Pakka Larra city, at the train crossing, where the cars stopped and waited when the gates were closed for passing trains. Whenever Mustafa went to change the oil on the jeep, the boy would come over, taking a break, and usually Mustafa would bring something from Chaudrey Sahib's kitchen, some fruit, or pilau in a plastic bag, which the boy would tuck away in the folds of his clothing, quite unconsciously and without any thanks, as if it were his right, smiling with remarkably white teeth. He too was a bird fancier, had a black partridge cock in a cage—his treasure—which he kept in the shade by the railway crossing, sitting by it and watching its movements when the traffic died; and this had been something they talked about, that and tumbler pigeons, which had been Mustafa's passion as a boy.

"I remember you," said Mustafa. "From the Pughal village."

"That's me. How are things back at home?" asked the boy, tilting his chin. His voice, which used to be shy, had become brassy and insistent here in the city. Still, he was a beggar, the poor boy. And then, after the child had disappeared from the village, everyone heard the details of how his parents had sold him to a speculator from the city, cash and carry, with a TV and a sewing machine thrown in, the works. The father boasted about it.

"Can I buy you something?" asked Mustafa. "Some tea or biscuits?"

The other drivers had been listening, amused, and now one of them roared with laughter. "Buy you something! That's hilarious. My friend, this cripple makes as much as I do, and that's after his owner takes a cut. I bet you get country wages. A car comes to pick him up every morning. He's worth a fortune, literally. Go on, boy, tell this fellow what you make."

Embarrassed, Mustafa picked up his empty cup and drained the last drops, narrowing his eyes as he tilted his head back.

"I do fairly well," said the boy modestly. "My spot rents for eighteen thousand a month. I get those foreigners, they keep trying not to look at me, and I do my little thing, and then they start pulling out the blue ones, the big notes."

He asked questions about the villages around Firoza and about the people there, and now his brazen tone became gentler, almost childlike. "Yeah, I miss it," he said. "The smell of the mango buds right about now, in the spring. I can almost taste it, like sugar mixed with snuff. There's none of that here. I even miss the whistle of the trains coming down the track, next to my little spot there." He hugged his crippled knees, exhaling. "There's nothing like hearing a voice from back home."

"Don't worry, nothing's changed," said Mustafa. "Master Hakim died, God be with him. But you didn't go to school, I suppose, so that wouldn't mean much to you."

"No, I didn't need any education. I've got my profession right here." He indicated his withered body with his chin. "It's a good racket. So how long are you going to be in town?" he asked amiably.

Mustafa paused before answering, almost as if he were ignoring the question. Finally he replied, "Not long," and then felt ashamed, acting coldly toward someone brought up not two kilometers from his own doorstep, an unfortunate boy, who spent his days now dragging himself between the lines of cars waiting at stoplights.

The other drivers were listening to the dark-faced man describing with relish having a head-on crash with a taxi, and pulling from the smoking wreck a painted-up female impersonator and two roly-poly property dealers from Gujranwala, drunk on moonshine, heading up to Murree on a spree, the hijra dabbing hysterically at a gash on her forehead.

The over-familiar cripple, the obscene story, both combined to sour Mustafa's mood. Why did drivers always boast about their accidents, which they should be ashamed of? When Chaudrey Sahib got elected to the Assembly, one of Mustafa's elders, who drove for a veteran politician from the same district, gave him a piece of advice: Stay in your car and listen to music while waiting for your master at Islamabad parties—it'll keep you from all sorts of unwanted intimacies.

He stood up and threw the dregs of the tea onto the ground. "I better get back to my car."

"They never come out so soon," said the boy. "Trust me, I hang out here every night. They keep at it in there."

"Chaudrey Sahib always heads home early," Mustafa said, lying.

"That's a pity," the boy responded studiedly.

Mustafa felt the others drivers watching as he left, and wondered what they would say when he got out of earshot, whether the boy would start yapping about him, about Chaudrey Sahib and Firoza. A lot of them would be politicians' drivers, people he would be seeing again at other weddings and events.

* * * * *

He slid behind the wheel of the car and pushed a cassette into the tape deck. Reshma's voice reminded him of home, of driving along the canal under the rosewood trees. In Sande Khan's village, as the beggar boy said. The beggar must be the same age as Mustafa's older son, think of that, his fine young son; and then this broken thing, rowing itself in jerks along the ground. The boy wouldn't live long, the badly-crippled ones never did. He sat in the car and smoked, feeling homesick.

Soon he saw the beggar boy detach himself from the ring of light around the tea stall and swing into the parking lot. He approached Mustafa's jeep, tapped boldly on the door, until Mustafa rolled down the window.