Home Boy by H. M. Naqvi

Author:H. M. Naqvi [Naqvi, M. H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-45991-6
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2009-11-08T05:00:00+00:00

9.

When I woke, it was bright, and I was numb, and for an instant I thought I was dead, but then the stench of cold urine filled my nostrils, and feeling returned to my body like an ache. There was no way to tell what time it was since the quality of light was unchanged, but I wasn’t rested, and my mouth was dry and tasted like shit. Shutting my eyes, I watched chimerical shapes shift in the electric darkness.

After my father’s death, I would shut my eyes, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes in bed at night, and imagine traveling at the speed of light, past planets and brightly lit stars and galaxies whirling in slow motion on an invisible axis. There would be high adventure, an urgent mission to save mankind, a chase by aliens, close encounters with meteor storms, requiring routine feats of dexterity and great presence of mind. Tossing in bed, I would issue muffled orders, make beeping sounds and sounds of things blowing up. My imaginary flights would stir restlessness and inevitably make me thirsty and want to pee, but I’d hold it in because I didn’t want to upset Ma.

At some juncture, however, I’d find her hovering above me in her red caftan with a halo of hallway light around her head. Of course, I’d pretend to sleep, attempt evasive maneuvers, but it would be too late. “What were you doing, baby?” she’d ask, sitting down beside me. Inspired from the sci-fi serial on Pakistan Television, the story usually but not always involved the Cylons—evil robots who speak like this—and Baltar, the bald overlord who always sits on a high chair. Together they would launch a sneak attack on Planet Earth, and even though I was young and inexperienced, I was good and brave and fighting back.

Running her fingers through my hair, Ma would listen with mild amusement, and after I was done, she would say something like “Listen, baby, space is very, very far away. You and me can’t worry about things so far away. We have to worry about right now, and tomorrow. You have school tomorrow. You have to do well in school. You are the man of the family. This is more responsibility than saving the universe.”

My universe had diminished: after my father died, we moved from our house off Tariq Road to a two-and-a-half-bedroom apartment in an apartment block off Bandar Road, on the other side of town. We no longer had a garden, no place to make mud men or loaf or play cricket; instead, there was a common concrete yard downstairs where teenagers often scuffled, and there was the street. I had no friends in the neighborhood, and it took almost an hour to get to and from school by van. When things changed, they seemed to change for the worse. But I made do.

There was also a tragedy of a different scale. We had spent almost a month packing our lives into cardboard boxes and steel trunks, and it took us another month to unpack.

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