Vanity Bagh by Anees Salim

Author:Anees Salim
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781447248064
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2013-06-05T23:00:00+00:00

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My life is my message.

~ Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

It was funny how I interpreted the poster above when I first noticed it on the wall. I took it for an advertisement for some mobile phone service that sold SMS packages to inmates who secretly use mobile phones with secret permission from wardens. Swindlers, politicians, tax evaders, high-class pimps and other well-connected bums live in the network coverage area even when they live in a jail. We, the lesser ones, are the ones who have to depend either on imagination or on telepathy to connect to the world outside the walls. The second time I read the poster I knew it actually was a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, though the last word of the quote still evoked in me the same image as the first time, that of the back of a digital envelope.

I was back to working outdoors, but only for a couple of days. The Book Room, like many other workplaces, was closed till the Independence Day celebrations were over. They

needed all available hands to deck up the prison like a big showpiece. In our mohalla, the Pintos resorted to such showoffs to let their church know their Christian identity was intact in a neighbourhood nicknamed Little Pakistan. Everything in Pintos’ Garage would have strings of blinking serial bulbs around it, even empty lubricant drums. There would be drummers and buglers, and free red wine and plum cake which they usually ran out of in the first half hour. The main attraction was the life-size stable they built in a corner of the garage on the eve of Christmas. Jerome Pinto’s younger sister Mary Pinto always played the Virgin Mary, and the same doll was dusted up every December and handed the role of infant Jesus. Wasim, wearing a wet strip of cotton for a beard and a wise look, once played one of the elderly men from Jerusalem until he abruptly vanished from the tableau. Blue turban, brown staff, white beard, wise look … all gone between two winks.

Where is imam sahib’s son

Antonio Rosario Pintonio Gonorrhea gone?

– Sheikh Zardari (1945-2003)

With a light frown and a half-smile the imam had arrived on the scene a while ago and was sizing up what he would later describe to Ammi as Christmas-time comedy when the tall elderly man towering over the Virgin Mary caught his attention. His frown deepened, smile waned, but Wasim pretended to be a Jerusalem citizen well past seventy, and continued to simper at the flowing traffic. The instant the imam turned his head to shout a question into George Pinto’s ear the tableau lost its baby-faced old man.

We later found him sitting on the washing stone near the alley well, the marshmallow-beard in his hands, his left toe doodling tree shapes on the wet earth. ‘Please come and bless our home, uncle,’ I said passing by. The imam put him on a two-week probation for wearing a white beard, holding a staff and standing by Virgin Mary Pinto

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