Nawabdin Electrician by Daniyal Mueenuddin

 

Nawab Din Electrician

By Daniyal Mueenuddin

 

He flourished on a signature ability: a technique for cheating the electric company by slowing down the revolutions of its meters, so cunningly performed that his customers could specify to the hundred-rupee note the desired monthly savings. In this Pakistani desert, behind Multan, where the tube wells pumped from the aquifer day and night, Nawab’s discovery eclipsed the philosopher’s stone. Some thought he used magnets, others said heavy oil or porcelain chips or a substance he found in beehives. Skeptics reported that he had a deal with the meter men. In any case, this trick guaranteed Nawab’s employment, both off and on the farm of his patron, K. K. Harouni.

The farm lay strung along a narrow and pitted farm-to-market road, built in the nineteen-seventies, when Harouni still had influence in the Islamabad bureaucracy. Buff or saline-white desert dragged out between fields of sugarcane and cotton, mango orchards and clover and wheat, soaked daily by the tube wells that Nawabdin Electrician tended. Beginning the rounds of Nurpur Harouni on his itinerant mornings, summoned to a broken pump, Nawab and his bicycle bumped along, decorative plastic flowers swaying on wires sprouting from the frame. His tools, notably a three-pound ball-peen hammer, clanked in a greasy leather bag suspended from the handlebars. The farmhands and the manager waited in the cool of the banyans, planted years earlier to shade each of the tube wells. “No tea, no tea,” Nawab insisted, waving away the steaming cup.

Hammer dangling from his hand like a savage’s axe, Nawab entered the oily room housing the pump and its electric motor. Silence. The men crowded the doorway till he shouted that he must have light. He approached the offending object warily but with his temper rising, circled it, pushed it about a bit, began to take liberties with it, settled in with it, called for a cup of tea next to it, and finally began disassembling it. With his long, blunt screwdriver he cracked the shields hiding the machine’s penetralia, a screw popping loose and flying into the shadows. He took the ball-peen and delivered a crafty blow. The intervention failed. Pondering the situation, he ordered one of the farmworkers to find a really thick piece of leather and to collect sticky mango sap from a nearby tree. So it went, all morning and into the afternoon, Nawab trying one thing and then another, heating the pipes, cooling them, joining wires together, circumventing switches and fuses. And yet somehow, in fulfillment of the local genius for crude improvisation, the pumps continued to run.

Unfortunately or fortunately, Nawab had married early in life a sweet woman of unsurpassed fertility, whom he adored, and she proceeded to bear him children spaced, if not less than nine months apart, then not that much more. And all daughters, one after another after another, until finally the looked-for son arrived, leaving Nawab with a complete set of twelve girls, ranging from toddler to age eleven, and one odd piece. If he had been governor of the Punjab, their dowries would have beggared him. For an electrician and mechanic, no matter how light-fingered, there seemed no question of marrying them all off. No moneylender in his right mind would, at any rate of interest, advance a sufficient sum to buy the necessary items for each daughter: beds, a dresser, trunks, electric fans, dishes, six suits of clothes for the groom, six for the bride, perhaps a television, and on and on and on.

Another man might have thrown up his hands—but not Nawabdin. The daughters acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course knew that he must proliferate his sources of revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni for tending the tube wells would not even begin to suffice. He set up a one-room flour mill, run off a condemned electric motor—condemned by him. He tried his hand at fish-farming in a pond at the edge of one of his master’s fields. He bought broken radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not demur even when asked to fix watches, although that enterprise did spectacularly badly, and earned him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took apart ever kept time again.

K. K. Harouni lived mostly in Lahore and rarely visited his farms. Whenever the old man did visit, Nawab would place himself night and day at the door leading from the servants’ sitting area into the walled grove of ancient banyan trees where the old farmhouse stood. Grizzled, his peculiar aviator glasses bent and smudged, Nawab tended the household machinery, the air-conditioners, water heaters, refrigerators, and pumps, like an engineer tending the boilers on a foundering steamer in an Atlantic gale. By his superhuman efforts, he almost managed to maintain K. K. Harouni in the same mechanical cocoon, cooled and bathed and lighted and fed, that the landowner enjoyed in Lahore.

Harouni, of course, became familiar with this ubiquitous man, who not only accompanied him on his tours of inspection but could be found morning and night standing on the master bed rewiring the light fixture or poking at the water heater in the bathroom. Finally, one evening at teatime, gauging the psychological moment, Nawab asked if he might say a word. The landowner, who was cheerfully filing his nails in front of a crackling rosewood fire, told him to go ahead.

“Sir, as you know, your lands stretch from here to the Indus, and on these lands are fully seventeen tube wells, and to tend these seventeen tube wells there is but one man, me, your servant. In your service I have earned these gray hairs”—here he bowed his head to show the gray—“and now I cannot fulfill my duties as I should. Enough, sir, enough. I beg you, forgive me my weakness. Better a darkened house and proud hunger within than disgrace in the light of day. Release me, I ask you, I beg you.”

The old man, well accustomed to these sorts of speeches, though not usually this florid, filed away at his nails and waited for the breeze to stop.

“What’s the matter, Nawabdin?”

“Matter, sir? Oh, what could be the matter in your service? I’ve eaten your salt for all my years. But, sir, on the bicycle now, with my old legs, and with the many injuries I’ve received when heavy machinery fell on me—I cannot any longer bicycle about like a bridegroom from farm to farm, as I could when I first had the good fortune to enter your service. I beg you, sir, let me go.”

“And what is the solution?” Harouni asked, seeing that they had come to the crux. He didn’t particularly care one way or the other, except that it touched on his comfort—a matter of great interest to him.“Well, sir, if I had a motorcycle, then I could somehow limp along, at least until I train up some younger man.”The crops that year had been good, Harouni felt expansive in front of the fire, and so, much to the disgust of the farm managers, Nawab received a brand-new motorcycle, a Honda 70. He even managed to extract an allowance for gasoline.

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing. He could now range farther, doing much wider business. Best of all, now he could spend every night with his wife, who early in the marriage had begged to live not in Nawab’s quarters in the village but with her family in Firoza, near the only girls’ school in the area. A long straight road ran from the canal headworks near Firoza all the way to the Indus, through the heart of the K. K. Harouni lands. The road ran on the bed of an old highway built when these lands lay within a princely state. Some hundred and fifty years ago, one of the princes had ridden that way, going to a wedding or a funeral in this remote district, felt hot, and ordered that rosewood trees be planted to shade the passersby. Within a few hours, he forgot that he had given the order, and in a few dozen years he in turn was forgotten, but these trees still stood, enormous now, some of them dead and looming without bark, white and leafless. Nawab would fly down this road on his new machine, with bags and streamers hanging from every knob and brace, so that the bike, when he hit a bump, seemed to be flapping numerous small vestigial wings; and with his grinning face, as he rolled up to whichever tube well needed servicing, with his ears almost blown off, he shone with the speed of his arrival.

Nawab’s day, viewed from the air, would have appeared as aimless as that of a butterfly: to the senior manager’s house in the morning, where he diligently paid his respects, then to one or another of the tube wells, kicking up dust on the unpaved field roads, into the town of Firoza, zooming beneath the rosewoods, a bullet of sound, moseying around town, sneaking away to one of his private interests—to cement a deal to distribute ripening early-season honeydews from his cousin’s vegetable plot, or to count before hatching his half share in a flock of chickens—then back to Nurpur Harouni, and out again. The maps of these days, superimposed, would have made a tangle, but every morning he emerged from the same place, just as the sun came up, and every evening he returned there, tired now, darkened, switching off the bike, rolling it over the wooden threshold of the door leading into the courtyard, the engine ticking as it cooled. Nawab leaned the bike on its kickstand each evening and waited for his girls to come, all of them, around him, jumping on him. His face at this moment often had the same expression—an expression of childish innocent joy, which contrasted strangely and even sadly with the heaviness of his face and its lines and stubble. He would raise his nose and sniff the air to see if he could guess what his wife had cooked for dinner, and then he went in to her, finding her always in the same posture, making him tea, fanning the fire in the hearth.

“Hello, my love, my chicken piece,” he said tenderly one evening, walking into the dark hut that served as a kitchen, the mud walls black with soot. “What’s in the pot for me?” He opened the cauldron, which had been displaced by the kettle onto the beaten-earth floor, and began to search around in it with a wooden spoon.

“Out! Out!” she said, taking the spoon and, dipping it into the curry, giving him a taste.

He opened his mouth obediently, like a boy receiving medicine. The wife, despite having borne thirteen children, had a lithe strong body, her vertebrae visible beneath her tight tunic. Her long mannish face still glowed from beneath the skin, giving her a ripe ochre coloring. Even now that her hair was thin and graying, she wore it in a single long braid down to her waist, like a young woman in the village. Although this style didn’t suit her, Nawab saw in her still the girl he had married twenty years before. He stood in the door, watching his daughters playing hopscotch, and when his wife went past he stuck out his butt, so that she rubbed against it as she squeezed through.

Nawab ate first, then the girls, and finally his wife. He sat out in the courtyard, burping and smoking a cigarette, looking up at the crescent moon just visible on the horizon. I wonder what the moon is made of? he thought, without exerting himself. He remembered listening to the radio when the Americans said they had walked on it. His thoughts wandered off onto all sorts of tangents. The dwellers around him in the hamlet had also finished their dinners, and the smoke from cow-dung fires hung over the darkening roofs, a harsh spicy smell, like rough tobacco. Nawab’s house had numerous ingenious contrivances—running water in all three rooms, a duct that brought cool air into the rooms at night, and even a black-and-white television, which his wife covered with a doily that she had embroidered with flowers. Nawab had constructed a gear mechanism so that the antenna on the roof could be turned from inside the house to improve reception. The children sat inside watching it, with the sound blaring. His wife came out and sat primly at his feet on the sagging ropes of the woven bed, swinging her legs.

“I’ve got something in my pocket—would you like to know what?” He looked at her with a pouting sort of smile.

“I know this game,” she said, reaching up and straightening his glasses on his face. “Why are your glasses always crooked? I think one ear’s higher than the other.”

“If you find it, you can have it.”

Looking to see that the children were still absorbed in the television, she kneeled next to him and began patting his pockets. “Lower . . . lower . . . ,” he said. In the pocket of the greasy vest that he wore under his kurta she found a wrapped-up newspaper holding chunks of raw brown sugar.

“I’ve got lots more,” he said. “Look at that. None of this junk you buy in the bazaar. The Dashtis gave me five kilos for repairing their sugarcane press. I’ll sell it tomorrow. Make us some parathas. For all of us? Pretty please?”

“I put out the fire.”

“So light it. Or, rather, you just sit here—I’ll light it.”

“You can never light it. I’ll end up doing it anyway,” she said, getting up.

The smaller children, smelling the ghee cooking on the griddle, crowded around, watching the brown sugar melt, and finally even the older girls came in, though they stood haughtily to one side.

Nawab, squatting and huffing on the fire, gestured to them. “Come on, you princesses, none of your tricks. I know you want some.”

They began eating, pouring the brown crystallized syrup onto pieces of fried bread, and after a while Nawab went to his motorcycle and pulled from the panniers another hunk of the sugar, challenging the girls to see who would eat most.

One evening a few weeks after his family’s little festival of sugar, Nawab was sitting with the watchman who kept guard over the grain stores at Nurpur Harouni. A banyan planted alongside the threshing floor only thirty years ago had grown a canopy of forty or fifty feet, and all the men who worked in the stores tended it carefully, watering it with cans. The old watchman sat under this tree, and Nawab and the other younger men would sit with him at dusk, teasing him, trying to make his violent temper flare up, and joking around with one another. They would listen to the old man’s stories, of the time when only dirt tracks led through these riverine tracts and the tribes stole cattle for sport, and often killed each other while doing it, to add piquancy.

Although spring weather had come, the watchman still kept a fire burning in a tin pan to warm his feet and to give a center to the group that gathered there. The electricity had failed, as it often did, and the full moon climbing the sky lit the scene indirectly, reflecting off the whitewashed walls, throwing dim shadows around the machinery strewn about, plows and planters, drags, harrows.

“Here it is, old man,” Nawab said to the watchman. “I’ll tie you up and lock you in the stores to make it look like a robbery, and then I’ll top off my tank at the gas barrel.”

“Nothing in it for me,” the watchman said. “Go on, I think I hear your wife calling you.”

“I understand, sire. You wish to be alone.”

Nawab jumped up and shook the watchman’s hand, making a bow, touching his hands deferentially to the old man’s knee, as he would to the feudal K. K. Harouni—a running joke, lost on the watchman these last ten years.

“Be careful, boy,” the watchman said, standing up and leaning on his bamboo staff, clad in steel at the tip.

Nawab leapt on the kick-starter of his motorcycle, and in one smooth motion flicked on the lights and shot out of the threshing-floor gates, onto the quarter-mile driveway leading from the heart of the farm to the road. He felt cold and liked it, knowing that at home the room would be baking, the two-bar heater running day and night on pilfered electricity, the family luxuriating in excess warmth, even though the spring weather had come. Turning onto the dark main road, he sped up, outrunning the weak headlight, obstacles appearing faster than he could react, feeling as if he were racing forward in the flame of a moving lantern. Nightjars perching on the road as they hunted moths ricocheted into the dark, almost under his wheel. Nawab locked his arms, fighting the bike as he flew over potholes, enjoying the pace, standing on the pegs. Among low-lying fields, where the sugarcane had been heavily watered, mist rose and cool air enveloped him. He slowed, turning onto the smaller road running beside the canal, hearing the water rushing over the locks of the headworks.

A man stepped from beside one of the locks, waving down at the ground, motioning Nawab to stop.

“Brother,” the man said, over the puttering engine, “give me a ride into town. I’ve got business, and I’m late.”

Strange business at this time of night, Nawab thought, the tail-light of the motorcycle casting a reddish glow around them on the ground. They were far from any dwellings. A mile away, the village of Dashtian crouched beside the road—before that there was nothing. He looked into the man’s face.

“Where are you from?” The man looked straight back at him, his face pinched and therefore overstated, but unflinching.

“From Kashmor. Please, you’re the first person to come by for over an hour. I’ve walked all day.”

Kashmor, Nawab thought. From the poor country across the river. Every year, those tribes came to pick the mangoes at Nurpur Harouni and other nearby farms, working for almost nothing, let go as soon as the harvest thinned. The men would give a feast, a thin feast, at the end of the season, a hundred or more going shares to buy a buffalo. Nawab had been several times, and was treated as if he were honoring them, sitting with them and eating the salty rice flecked with bits of meat.

He grinned at the man, gesturing with his chin to the seat behind him. “All right, then, get on the back.”

Balancing against the weight behind him, which made driving along the rutted canal road difficult, Nawab pushed on, under the rosewood trees.

Half a mile from the headworks, the man shouted into Nawab’s ear, “Stop!”

“What’s wrong?” Nawab couldn’t hear over the rushing wind.

The man jabbed something hard into his ribs.

“I’ve got a gun. I’ll shoot you.”

Panicked, Nawab skidded to a stop and jumped to one side, pushing the motorcycle away from him, so that it tipped over, knocking the robber to the ground. The carburetor float hung open, and the engine raced for a minute, the wheel jerking, until the engine sputtered and died, extinguishing the headlight.

“What are you doing?” Nawab babbled.

“I’ll shoot you if you don’t stand back,” the robber said, rising up on one knee, the gun pointed at Nawab.

They stood obscured in the sudden woolly dark, next to the fallen motorcycle, which leaked raw-smelling gasoline into the dust underfoot. Water running through the reeds in the canal beside them made soft gulping sounds as it swirled along. His eyes adjusting to the dark, Nawab saw the man sucking at a cut on his palm, the gun held in his other hand.

When the man went to pick up the bike, Nawab approached a step toward him.

“I told you, I’ll shoot you.”

Nawab put his hands together in supplication. “I beg you, I’ve got little girls, thirteen children. I promise, thirteen. I tried to help you. I’ll drive you to Firoza, and I won’t tell anyone. Don’t take the bike—it’s my daily bread. I’m a man like you, poor as you.”

“Shut up.”

Without thinking, a flash of cunning in his eyes, Nawab lunged for the gun, but missed. For a moment the two men grappled, until the robber broke free, stepped back, and fired. Nawab fell to the ground, holding his groin with both hands, entirely surprised, shocked, as if the man had slapped him for no reason.

The man dragged the bike away, straddled it, and tried to start it, bobbing up and down, pitching his weight onto the lever, the engine whirring but not catching. It had flooded, and he held the throttle wide open, which made it worse. At the sound of the shot, the dogs in Dashtian had begun to bark, the sound fitful in the breeze.

Lying on the ground, at first Nawab thought the man had killed him. The pale moonlit sky, seen through the branches of the rosewood tree, tilted back and forth like a bowl of swaying water. He had fallen with one leg bent under him, and now he straightened it. His hand came away sticky when he touched the wound. “O God, O Mother, O God,” he moaned, not very loudly, in a singsong voice. He looked at the man, whose back was turned, vulnerable, kicking wildly at the starter, not six feet away. Nawab couldn’t let him take it away—not the bike, his toy, his freedom.

He stood up again and stumbled forward, but his injured leg buckled and he fell, his forehead hitting the rear bumper of the motorcycle. Turning in the seat, holding the gun at arm’s length, the robber fired five more times, one two three four five, with Nawab looking up into his face in disbelief, seeing the repeated flame in the revolver’s mouth. The man had never used weapons, had fired this unlicensed revolver only one time, to try it out when he bought it from a bootlegger. He couldn’t bear to point at the torso or the head, but shot at the groin and the legs. The last two bullets missed wildly, throwing up dirt in the road. The robber rolled the motorcycle forward twenty feet, grunting, and again tried to start it. From Dashtian a torch jogged quickly down the road. Throwing the bike to the ground, the man ran into a stand of reeds that bordered a field.

Nawab lay in the road, not wanting to move. When the bullets first hit him, they didn’t so much hurt as sting, but now the pain grew worse. The blood felt warm in his pants.

It seemed very peaceful. In the distance, the dogs kept barking, and all around the cicadas called, so many of them that they blended into a single gentle sound. In a mango orchard across the canal, some crows began cawing, and he wondered why they were calling at night. Maybe a snake up in the tree, in the nest. Fresh fish from the spring floods of the Indus had just come onto the market, and he kept remembering that he had wanted to buy some for dinner, perhaps the next night. As the pain grew worse, he thought of that, the smell of frying fish.

Two men from the village came running up, one much younger than the other, both of them bare-chested. The elder, potbellied, carried an ancient single-barrelled shotgun, the butt mended crudely with wire.

“Oh God, they’ve killed him. Who is it?”

The younger man kneeled down next to the body. “It’s Nawab, the electrician, from Nurpur Harouni.”

“I’m not dead,” Nawab said insistently, without raising his head. He knew these men, a father and son—he had arranged the lighting at the son’s wedding. “The bastard’s right there in those reeds.”

Stepping forward, aiming into the center of the clump, the older man fired, reloaded, and fired again. Nothing moved among the green leafy stalks, which were head high and surmounted by feathers of seed.

“He’s gone,” the young man said, sitting next to Nawab, holding his arm.

The father walked carefully forward, holding the gun to his shoulder. Something moved, and he fired. The robber fell forward into the open ground. He called, “Mother, help me,” and got up on his knees, holding his hands to his waist. Walking up to him, the father hit him once in the middle of the back with the butt of the gun, and then threw down the gun and dragged him roughly by his collar onto the road. Raising the bloody shirt, he saw that the robber had taken half a dozen buckshot pellets in the stomach—black angry holes seeping blood in the light of the torch. The robber kept spitting, without any force.

The son got up and started the motorcycle by pushing it down the road with the gears engaged, until the engine came to life. Shouting that he would get some transport, he raced off, and Nawab winced, hearing the man, in his hurry, shifting without using the clutch.

“Do you want a cigarette, Uncle?” the old villager said to Nawab, offering the pack.

Nawab rolled his head back and forth. “Fuck, look at me.”

In the silence, a forgotten thought kept bothering Nawab, something important. Then he remembered.

“Find the guy’s revolver, Bholay. You’re going to need it for the cops.”

“I can’t leave you,” he said. But after a minute he threw away his cigarette and got up.

The old man was still searching in the reeds when the lights of a pickup materialized at the canal headworks and bounced wildly down the road. The driver, doubtful of the whole affair, stood by while the father and son lifted Nawab and the motorcycle thief into the back. They drove to Firoza, to a private clinic there, run by a mere pharmacist, who nevertheless kept a huge clientele because of his abrupt and sure manner and his success at healing all the prevalent diseases with the same few medicines.

The clinic smelled of disinfectant and of bodily fluids, a heavy sweetish odor. Four beds stood in a room, dimly lit by a fluorescent tube. As the father and son carried him in, Nawab, alert to the point of strain, observed blood on some rumpled sheets, a rusty blot. The pharmacist, who lived above the clinic, had come down wearing a loincloth and undershirt. He seemed perfectly unflustered, if anything slightly cross at having been disturbed.

“Put them on those two beds.”

“As salaam aleikum, Dr. Sahib,” said Nawab, who felt as if he were speaking to someone very far away. The pharmacist seemed an immensely grave and important man, and Nawab spoke to him formally.

“What happened, Nawab?”

“He tried to snatch my motorbike, but I didn’t let him.”

The pharmacist pulled off Nawab’s shalwar, got a rag, and washed away the blood, then poked around quite roughly, while Nawab held the sides of the bed and willed himself not to scream. “You’ll live,” he said. “You’re a lucky man. The bullets all went low.”

“Did it hit . . .”

The pharmacist dabbed with the rag. “Not even that, thank God.”

The robber must have been hit in the lung, for he kept breathing up blood.

“You won’t need to bother taking this one to the police,” the pharmacist said. “He’s a dead man.”

“Please,” the robber begged, trying to raise himself up. “Have mercy, save me. I’m a human being also.”

The pharmacist went into the office next door and wrote the names of drugs on a pad, sending the villager’s son to a dispenser in the next street.

“Wake him and tell him it’s Nawabdin the electrician. Tell him I’ll make sure he gets the money.”

Nawab looked over at the robber for the first time. There was blood on his pillow, and he kept snuffling, as if he needed to blow his nose. His thin and very long neck hung crookedly on his shoulder, as if out of joint. He was older than Nawab had thought, not a boy, dark-skinned, with sunken eyes and protruding yellow smoker’s teeth, which showed whenever he twitched for breath.

“I did you wrong,” the robber said weakly. “I know that. You don’t know my life, just as I don’t know yours. Even I don’t know what brought me here. Maybe you’re a poor man, but I’m much poorer than you. My mother is old and blind, in the slums outside Multan. Make them fix me, ask them to and they’ll do it.” He began to cry, not wiping away the tears, which drew lines on his dark face.

“Go to hell,” Nawab said, turning away. “Men like you are good at confessions. My children would have begged in the streets.”

The robber lay heaving, moving his fingers by his sides. The pharmacist seemed to have gone away somewhere.

“They just said that I’m dying. Forgive me for what I did. I was brought up with kicks and slaps and never enough to eat. I’ve never had anything of my own, no land, no house, no wife, no money, never, nothing. I slept for years on the railway-station platform in Multan. My mother’s blessing on you. Give me your blessing, don’t let me die unforgiven.” He began snuffling and coughing even more, and then started hiccupping.

Now the disinfectant smelled strong and good to Nawab. The floor seemed to shine. The world around him expanded.

“Never. I won’t forgive you. You had your life, I had mine. At every step of the road I went the right way and you the wrong. Look at you now, with bubbles of blood stuck in the corner of your lips. Do you think this isn’t a judgment? My wife and children would have wept all their lives, and you would have sold my motorbike to pay for six unlucky hands of cards and a few bottles of poison home brew. If you weren’t lying here now, you would already be in one of the gambling camps along the river.”

The man said, “Please, please, please,” more softly each time, and then he stared up at the ceiling. “It’s not true,” he whispered. After a few minutes, he convulsed and died. The pharmacist, who had come back in by then and was cleaning Nawab’s wounds, did nothing to help him.

Yet Nawab’s mind caught at this, at the man’s words and his death, like a bird hopping around some bright object, meaning to peck at it. And then he didn’t. He thought of the motorcycle, saved, and the glory of saving it. Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them had killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician. ♦