Nobody Can Love You More by Mayank Austen Soofi

Author:Mayank Austen Soofi [Soofi, Mayank Austen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

‘What did you do with his body?’ I ask.

‘We threw it into the dump yard,’ says Sabir Bhai. He is smoking a bidi, sitting on the bench.

‘What about Sherni?’

‘What will she do? She is eating leaves and having fun in life,’ says Nighat Khala, sipping her tea.

AMONG SABIR BHAI’S FOUR BOYS, Omar is wiser than his years. He wears black-rimmed spectacles and his hair is short. He reads the Quran daily. He has a prayer bump on his forehead—the mark of faith. When I first met him, about a year ago, he said that he wanted to be a maulana. Unlike Osman, who is always in jeans, or Masoom, who dresses in Spiderman T-shirts, Omar wears loose shirts and trousers. The colours are lighter shades of cream, brown or grey. Today, his costume is almost festive. There are three pleats on his light blue trousers and his white shirt is crisscrossed with navy blue stripes. He is wearing black plastic sandals. We are walking to Chawri Bazaar on an errand. Sabir Bhai has asked him to get the monthly electricity bill photocopied. I sense an opportunity to discuss a matter that I’m uncomfortable raising with him.

‘Omar,’ I say in a careful, casual tone, as if I’m about to chat about the weather. ‘When does a child growing up in GB Road realize what his mother’s business is?’

We are walking past a row of hair salons and mithai shops. Flies are buzzing from jalebis to roadside drains and back. I glance at Omar. Have I been rude or cruel? Will he tell Sabir Bhai? Will Sabir Bhai be upset? Will I be asked to stop coming to their kotha?

Omar speaks up. ‘When he is fifteen or sixteen years old,’ he says, holding my hand. ‘When a child is small, he doesn’t know what his mother is doing. But later, as he realizes that his mother entertains men, he feels bad.’

We move to the side of the street to give way to a rickshaw.

‘I think I was seven when I discovered that my home was actually a kotha. I saw the things that were happening in my house. We had women sitting on the stairs. They would bring men inside and argue about rates. As I grew older, I realized that this was a wrong kind of work.

‘It’s wrong. Yes, it’s wrong. In a way, it’s wrong. In a way, it’s right. It’s right because the women need money for their families. They have to provide for food. It’s wrong because the child suffers for the work his mother does.’

MOTHER PHALAK IS DARK. Father Sabir is dark. Omar, Osman and Masoom are dark. But Imran is white. His hair is blonde. Imran, or Immu as he is fondly called, was born of Phalak for sure. She gave birth to him in a municipality-run maternity hospital where most GB Road women deliver their babies. But who is his biological father? He has to be a foreigner. Was he a customer of Phalak’s? Does

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.