City of Spies by Sorayya Khan

Author:Sorayya Khan [Khan, Sorayya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503941571
Publisher: Little A
Published: 2017-09-18T16:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

Mid-July 1979

My grandfather would never have admitted it, but it was true: Lahore stank, and Islamabad did not. Arriving at Lahore airport was like landing in the belly of an olfactory machine. Dung, charcoal, onions, sweat, garbage, sewage, oranges, and diesel fumes. For the first few minutes on the tarmac and during the car ride home, it was difficult to breathe.

It was the first time I’d visited my grandfather in his new boxlike house, made uglier by wrought iron grills installed across the windows for security. It was ironic because Shadman, the district to which my grandfather had moved, was once a sprawling jail, leveled long ago to make room for a residential area. Yet, here was the jail, coming to life again in my grandfather’s windows. The mosque across the street made me think my grandfather would have been safe without grills. Who burglarizes a home within sight of one of God’s houses?

After giving me a tour, my grandfather deposited me in the kitchen, then hurried to his new study, already a mess, to listen to the radio news. I waited while Yunis prepared my favorite Lahore lassi, the special one he’d been making for me ever since I could remember. Just as Yunis handed me my glass filled to the brim with the delicious mix of mangoes, yogurt, and shaved ice, the house shook with such shrill shrieks of microphone feedback that I spilled the drink.

“Allah!” Yunis said, using God’s name in vain to complain about the noise and the pool of orange near my feet.

“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar.” The muezzin’s call to prayer became decipherable. The microphone shot the muezzin’s voice into the kitchen, shaking the single-pane windows and the wooden cabinets and making the teak door between the kitchen and dining room swing slightly back and forth.

“Is the azaan always this loud here?” I shouted in Urdu to Yunis. “How can you sleep in the morning?”

“Our general doesn’t think we should be sleeping,” he joked. “We should all be praying on a janamaz!” Yunis laughed hard and I joined him. Since he was Christian, I’d never pictured him on a janamaz.

My grandfather suddenly threw open the intricately carved front doors. The bolt slammed into the wall, where it had already left countless marks. He stood on the front stoop, waving a flexed palm in a threatening gesture at the mosque across the street. The azaan grew louder.

All across the country, in small and large cities alike, the call to prayer was heard five times a day. The only exception was my school, where not even the slightest echo had ever been heard. But my ears had never been assaulted by an azaan like this, an azaan so extraordinary that it sent my deaf grandfather into a rage.

From the kitchen, I could see the neighborhood mosque behind my grandfather in the doorway. My father had used it, and anything else he could think of, to persuade my grandfather to leave Five Queen’s Road for a new home in Shadman.

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