The Monsters That Live Within
Sidrah Haque
On a calm Thursday morning, in the corner of a sleepy Islamabad suburb tucked near the Margallas, Rasheed Ullah was only half awake, as he mechanically swept his jhaaru over the straggly grass beneath the ominous water tower.
He felt the sparse bristles snag on something stringy, emitting a strong odor. Cursing at what the stray dogs must have dragged in this time, he bent down for a closer look.
He saw the unmistakable hand of a day-old infant.
Rasheed Ullah was now fully awake, as he ran shouting for help.
###
The scuffed, beaten white police van made all the pot holes feel considerably worse. Inspector Asif pinched his temple, anything to get rid of the lingering edge of yesterday’s migraine. The third this month. The new Assistant Superintendent, who had graduated from civil services training four months ago, the equivalent to diapers compared to his own service, was proving to be a difficult boss to maneuver. Just last week, he railed his men on the performance indices that were to come into place soon.
The vehicle shuttled through the rubble-infested Kurri Road, whose bordering buildings bore bare ribs, broken down in the latest anti-encroachment drive. The driver made a laborious U-turn, avoiding a congested spot flanked with CDA officials in neon vests, measuring and marking the construction that had crept into the six meter boundary of the main road.
The inspector cursed as they swerved, missing a bulldozer carrying the remains of a home. Onlookers watched morosely, paying little heed to the traffic.
The driver, Abbasi, took a shortcut. He was familiar with the area, a chacha’s haveli in the village past a major mobile carrier’s headquarters down the road. Abbasi drove through a stunted dirt road, past even more unauthorized construction by the locals, who had propped makeshift shops anywhere they could, selling shoes, paan, a dollar store choked with Chinese toys, a chai khokha. Asif muttered under his breath, annoyed.
No one believes the law would get them, until it does, and then the law is wrong.
The van groaned through a few more turns, quickly arriving at the wrought-iron gates of the Enclave Society. Asif scoffed as he opened the door to get out, signaling to his men in the back. The van was parked confidently at the mouth of the gate, blocking flowing traffic. The police was here on business and they were making sure everyone knew it.
Inspector Asif fixed his belt and looked past the metal grille to the bungalows lining the flowered avenue. The place was brimming with freshly-painted homes, most belonging to bureaucrats, retired Army officials, senators. This was no place for a crime scene.
Or perhaps, it was a perfect one.
The Head Guard at the society gate approached nervously, giving a weak salute. Asif stretched a hand to him, patting his back with the other – he wanted to put everyone at ease. In his line of work, cases get solved quicker when everyone cooperated.
“Tell me everything”, Inspector Asif beckoned.
###
A few lanes away, Mrs. Chatta was stealthily peeking from the finials of her black gate. She glanced around in the cold daylight of the morning, watching the neighbors fill a car with uniformed children. She stepped out, pretending to check on the new rose beds the maali had implanted the other day, but in reality she was glancing at the water tower, just a street away, wondering what the police had found.
Mrs. Chatta worked hard for her position as neighborhood watchdog. She made it her business to know everything that went on in the streets that surrounded her home. It wasn’t easy work. She kept track of newcomers, personally welcoming them into her neighborhood, with her phone number, a bag of fruit from her husbands’ farm in Sargodha, and the self-assuredness that she was the person to call if you wanted to hire house staff, know where to get the freshest fruit, and find out which bahu was on the outs with her in-laws.
Mrs. Chatta had three children, all married and busy making something of their lives, and a retired husband who spent his entire days swimming laps at Islamabad Club. This gave Mrs. Chatta agency to invest herself completely in the lives of everyone outside her own family, with the aid of her cook, the primary gatherer of rumors, winds, and neighborhood speculation.
The said cook, a bronze twenty-something from Muzaffarabad, was thin as a rake, with a mind as quick as a metal pipe sliced in the air. Zafar, or Rafi as he was called by everyone, had a soft voice, deceiving an observer with a greased tongue. Rafi had a way of extrapolating the happenings of the neighborhood, from the very expressions of the house help that congregated at the mosque for Jummah, sniffing out the dirt through an impressive play of trust and connivance. His command on physiology made him an expert in sifting facts, and consequently invaluable to Mrs Chatta, who had tested his information for years, never yet to hear a fabrication. Rafi, despite making an average aloo ghost and thick rotis with charred bubbles, was an immoveable fixture of the Chatta household.
At this week’s Friday congregation, in the midst of autumn rain chronicles, and an update on the Kashmiri’s dog at Street 5 that had bitten someone on a walk, the whispers emerged that a dead newborn had been found in the bushes under the water tower.
A few minutes later, Mrs. Chatta’s loyal pet had informed her, spurring her immediately to action, calling her husband and then her bureaucrat son to pull strings to find out all they could.
This is how, on Monday morning, after Mrs. Chatta was done pretending to check the petunias, had conveniently gone for a stroll just as a Police van arrived at the water tower for their investigations.
###
Sadiqa’s cheeks were turning ruby red, her pace swift, determined to make it to the daktaarni before mid-day. Her temperamental baaji was doing night shifts nowadays and was especially volatile, now that another cook had run off after just two days. Sadiqa had tried explaining that no one yelled at their house help anymore to get things done, and men – be they full-time staff or husbands – wanted to live in quiet homes. For all the degrees darktaarni had, it was hard to get through to her.
But Sadiqa was depending on an advance on her salary today. The new session for school had started, and she needed four sets of notebooks for her four school-going children. She was banking on the daktaarni feeling benevolent today, which she occasionally did.
Sadiqa was walking determinedly towards Street 11, glancing at the sidewalk that wrapped the green belt, near the looming water tower. A woman in a burka was sitting with a little girl, whose bleached hair was caked in sweat and dirt. Sadiqa grimaced thinking of her own four children in white uniforms washed with neel, and hair slicked neatly with oil, sent off to school this morning with her very own hands. Some women just didn’t care like she did, she thought. She would’ve passed the duo, had her eyes missed the blood-soaked burka of the woman, who she now noticed, was heaving.
“Are you alright?” Sadiqa called out to the woman, in Punjabi.
“No, aapi, I’m in so much misery right now, where do I even begin?”
Her heaves dissolved into a full wail.
Sadiqa paused, and moved nearer.
She was a woman of some faults. Sadiqa possessed a sharp tongue that was greased with Punjabi cusswords that she easily slipped into conversation. She had a penchant for throwing things, at her children, her husband, once even at a baaji who refused to pay her a few days’ worth of salary after firing her. She told white lies even when there was little need to, liking the sound of her own embellished tales. Another fault she had, was bouts of irrational measures of generosity, that made her feel benevolent, purposeful. Like the one that was now taking over.
“What happened?” Sadiqa halted in front of the woman, at full attention, wondering if a no-good husband had beaten her up.
“Aapi, I’ve come from 25 kilometers away. I had to change two buses and walk half an hour to get here, to a house that needed a young girl for work. I wanted to drop Zainab off, but they took one look at her and refused. They didn’t even give me money for the journey back, just a glass of warm water and they shut the gate on our face. And just now aapi, I’ve started to menstruate, and so heavily, I cannot tell you how much pain I’m in. Every month it’s the same, the pain just kills me, I’m useless in bed for a whole week, I can’t even get up to cook the meals. The hakeem’s dumm doesn’t work anymore. I went back to that same house, but they refused to let me use their bathroom. Maybe they thought I was going to rob them, but just look at me, I’m covered in blood from my waist-down, I don’t know- ”
The woman stopped to wail, but her tears poured hotly down her cheeks.
Sadiqa studied the woman’s bloodied clothes and then the sad little girl clutching a small packet of unopened tea biscuits.
Her mind was made.
“Follow me – my house is a 5-minute walk outside the society. You can use my bathroom. I’ve got an extra pair of clothes I needed to give to someone. I guess they were meant for you.”
The woman gawked, but somehow the words registered somewhere. She almost stumbled to reach for Sadiqa’s hand, grasping them, kissing them in gratitude.
“Come on, come on, let’s go”, Sadiqa said softly, gesturing to the child to get up. The woman’s reaction was an affirmation that this was, in fact, the right thing to do, pleasing her immensely.
As the two women, tagged by the bewildered child, crossed the wrought-iron gates that signaled the start of the housing society, they passed a chorus of laughter that suddenly erupted. The guards were busy telling jokes to one another, laughing coarsely, the way only men could. One of them peeked at the women passing by, his eyebrows raised at the sight of the burka drenched around the ankles in sickly blood, but he turned around to laugh at some other meaningless comment, unbeknownst to the tragedies of women, Sadiqa thought.
###
Inspector Asif’s fingers rattled nervously over the broken glass sheet that covered the tattered table which was his desk. On one side, fat files, tags and annexures oozing out, took up the entire corner. On another, a grimy, yellowed Panasonic telephone whose wires were curled into knots, lay silent under his gaze.
He was sure they had found their culprit – but he needed answers to questions: mainly, how two and a half women could manage to bury a newborn without attracting attention. His mind railed around the physicality of it all – the digging, the implements, the timing.
He lit a Capstan cigarette, inhaling deeply to take the edge off..
The guards said Sadiqa was always punctual, entering the main gate to start her first house at 9 am. He inhaled again.
The phone rang.
“Hello? Is she there? Okay, I’m on my way.”
###
Sadiqa was in hysterics, and her tongue had slipped to her pet Punjabi curses.
“I don’t know her – I keep telling you – I’ve worked here for two years, why would I want to help a woman bury a newborn and then walk her out under your stupid faces!”
“Save it for the police”, snarled one of the guards, who didn’t like being spoken to that way, from a woman of all people.
###
Mrs. Chatta huffed on her second successive loop around the green belt that ran laterally down the society’s main road, in hopes of glimpsing one of the maids being grilled for her involvement in the Society Newborn Scandal, as it was now dubbed.
The guards, standing at rare attention near the gate, were ablaze with the loud, insolent Sadiqa, central to the scandal. Last night, Rafi had divulged to Mrs. Chatta that a maid was set to be apprehended for questioning the following morning. He informed her silently, while potting the watery chicken karhai, causing Mrs Chatta’s morning plans to change quite rapidly.
Just as Mrs. Chatta was about to take her third round, she heard a woman’s unmistakable screech, taking on three security guards.
A crowd of nearby drivers and chowkidaars was slowly forming, taking in the hostilities.
The same moment, a police van made its way towards the gate. Mrs. Chatta noticed a uniformed man brandishing a cane stick, and a belt wound tightly over his thick trunk, step out the door. Almost immediately a sickening calm descended amongst the guards and Sadiqa as everyone’s eyes fixed onto the police van.
Mrs. Chatta turned towards her house, knowing this was enough for the day. Now it was the law that would deal with the crooks.
###
Sadiqa spent one night in jail, questioned and humiliated by two fat, hectoring policewomen who patted her roughly on the back and chest.
“You’re wasting our time – just tell us who she was”, they kept pestering.
Sadiqa maintained that she was innocent.
“Come on – no one lets a complete stranger into their house nowadays. That too when you’re in the middle of work. You can’t fool us.”
By the second night, Sadiqa’s distraught husband, who worked as a cook at a prestigious English-medium school, was able to successfully plead to one of the faculty members, whose husband was in the police force, to bail out his innocent wife.
It took a few hours, and a few thousand rupees, but Sadiqa was let go, the proof against her deemed insufficient. With no one to press further charges on the infanticide, the case was filed away, unsolved, added to a pile of others just like it.
Inspector Asif was already occupied by a string of burglaries in Blue Area.
###
A few days later, Mrs. Chatta sat in her white sarkari Mehran, and looked on with glee at the maids clambering into a line with their spouses. Enclave Society had adopted strict registration measures seemingly overnight, and now every house help coming from outside the compound walls would need to register their complete details, along with their spouses’, to be able to set foot inside.
“About time”, Mrs. Chatta nodded in approval. At last, something good was to come from the entire fiasco.
###
“See, I handled it”, smirked Rafi, his hair slick with oil, his thin lips smiling under a freshly-shaped moustache.
His year-long lover, the nanny from two houses away, Nazia, grimaced.“But, how are you sure?” she hesitated.
Nazia was just seventeen, on her first tryst, in her first ever city away from the sheltered life back in her village in South Punjab. She was still a hormonal wreck.
“Trust me.”
“Baji knows something is wrong, she’s been asking so many questions. I don’t know what to do.”
“It’s okay, we got rid of it. It’s done. It won’t happen again”, he reached out and caressed her face.
“What if Sadiqa proves herself somehow?” Nazia balked.
“How would she?”, Rafi replied in a slippery voice. “She’s been fired by all three houses she worked at, no one hires a child-killer, alleged or not. She doesn’t come here anymore. Don’t worry. We’ll be careful now”.
His hand slid around Nazia’s waist, as the full moon shone brightly across the conjoined rooftops that night.