With twenty rupees in his pockets, there was only one way Pervez could go.

And it was starting to seem like a tough decision already.

It’s not that he didn’t have direction. He had the directions and the dictation right: he knew exactly where he had been told to go. He knew where he was supposed to go. Surely, he could go there. But the minarets of the mosque didn’t pull at his heartstrings as much as the magnetic mansions that housed other objects of interest did: a friend’s house in a different locality, a local parchoon shop that sold all sorts of colourful candy, a bazaar, a ground where boys would let you play cricket if you contributed only twenty rupees. Pervez had twenty rupees to spare, the wide world to see, and he couldn’t make a decision.

Of course, there was the maternal order that his mother had strictly hurled his way before he had rushed out of the house: to the mosque you must go, and nowhere else.

From his area a qinqui could take him to the grand mosque with the green dome (there was one like that in every locality, and Pervez could never tell one from the other) for twenty rupees. The fare used to be fifteen rupees not many days ago, but they said that inflation was rampant, that the dollar was going up, that taxes were stamped even more strictly, that the gormint was killing people, and that the ‘new’ state was a hearty joke. It was a joke, they said, but they didn’t laugh when they said it.

But they had laughed—snickered, really, as if they shared some joke Pervez couldn’t quite understand—when his mother had to told him that to the mosque he must go, and nowhere else. It would be quite a journey—but he also carried twenty rupees in his pocket, he had twenty minutes to make it in time for the prayers, and twenty different ideas ran amok in his head. He wasn’t praying yet—only walking (I really don’t want to go to the mosque!) towards his praying place, but Pervez felt as if the ritual had begun already. After all, it was only when you prayed that everything around you appeared to be so much more interesting, so much more appealing, so much more intriguing. They said prayer brought light into the world. Okay then what about praying at night? He used to ask.

Besides, why couldn’t he have prayed at home?—this was the question that burned like a hot poker in his head as he made his slow walk towards the bus stop. There were questions all around him alright: a customer asking a vendor how much the apples were for and wasn’t he selling them at twice the price? the vendor asking back if the customer had asked around the market? a man asking another man if he had change for five hundred rupees? the man asking the other man why did he need the change? a girl asking a dairy shop owner if the yoghurt had arrived yet? the shop owner asking the girl if the mother was making biryani that day? All around him questions were shot like bullet rain—rapid fire rounds that were successfully deflected or shielded against and never fully answered. Just like they’d done at home.

But why can’t I pray at home?—that had been the question, and he’d received the answer he had known he’d get: that there’s more enterprise in praying with other men of faith in a place of faith. Besides, they had thrust twenty rupees into his hand and it had little mattered why they wanted him out of the house. There was a reason, Pervez supposed, but it was an unquestionable one. Unquestionable reason, after all, never came knocking at the tightly locked doors of the burlesque bhai sahebs in this city: deflecting with the shields of dismissal was so much easier than confronting the mad ire of a questioning bullet. But reason was hardly a wilful participant in the doleful affairs that necessitated the momentary removal of a boy who must be sent kneeling on a prayer mat—there are things that desi dunderheads believe cannot be carried out in the same quadrivium walls as praying to the divine. And his parents wanted to do one of those things, he supposed.

He supposed it was something only adults did, what they wanted to do. After all, they couldn’t do it with him at home, and so he found himself wondering which way to go. Like God, let us too turn our sights away from whatever purported at home. It was a one-room flat, and Pervez had to be sent away. The poor must time their passions—they have such little space to hide them in. Often, this time and space does not exist simultaneously. The veils of the poor are scant and ragged.

How could the sleazy and the sanctimonious, the wonderful and the vulgar, the deific and the disgusting, be, and be at once? For how could the obscene and the omnipresent be at once, and not shy from each other—how could the eternal face the indecorous and not be harrowed by its overarching coarseness—how could raw sapien craving be mindful of the rapturous and not retreat in shame? There was, after all, no such thing as divine dirt, as hallowed harlots, as transcendental tawdriness. Reason and want begged the momentary omission of the acknowledgement of everything divine for as long as lewdness and desire ruled—it came so naturally to them that it was hard to deflect, and so they must sacrifice confronting God and submit to confronting the animal desires of God’s creation. It was almost too vulgar to even wonder that the all-seeing eye saw them as they did it—and so they never bothered with wondering, or with questioning, or with answering their child when he asked why couldn’t he do it at home?

Because they had to do it at home—the home would for the moment transform into a harem—and the four walls that constitute a house of prayer cannot a house of pleasure be. Prayer and passion cannot inhabit the same country. Distinction must be made, distance must be placed between the two, and damnation should be avoided. It was thus that they placed a twenty rupee note in their child’s hand, ordered him to go do his duty while they did theirs, and were gleefully ignorant at the moment that their son stood not in front of a steeple but in front of a street show, watching attentively.

The street show was this: an ancient man sat on the sidewalk with an unbelievably massive mane of white that was dotted with pigeonshit and specks of smut, decorated with titters of tarnish and glittered with grit and grime. His head, too, overflowed with sooty hair: decidedly white beneath patterns of pollution. What was visible of his face, amidst the wild waves of hair, was besought with wrinkles and frowns, the lines visible even more clearly given how the filth from the air had nestled and made home in the deep crevices. Pervez was old enough to understand that the man simply couldn’t afford face wash, but he wasn’t old enough to care. No one, he could see, was old enough to care.

He had seen the same old man on many occasions that day: in the morning when he’d come to the local confectionary for greasy goodness, the classic Sunday breakfast of deep fried diabetes. He’d seen the sage again when he’d come by this way to ask the dairy shop owner if the yoghurt had been made yet (it had not). He’d seen the man yet again when he had run to the tailor’s to inquire after one of his mother’s dresses (no, boy, did he not know there was electricity shortage, and that the Kay Electric were mongrels, and that the dress was not ready at all?). And every time that Pervez had seen the antique man with his shattered visage and frown and wrinkled lip, he had witnessed the same scene play out. The same episode, playing repeatedly as if in a loop, with the same outcome: “God will bless, brother.”

As a man—or woman—would approach the bus stand near the antique man, he would spring into verbal action: please sir, alms sir, help brother, aid my son, I shall pray for your daughter, etcetera.

He had asked a man in a stiff white kurta with cufflinks and a madrassah-compliant beard when Pervez had been buying Sunday breakfast. The man had said, “God will bless you, baba.”

He had asked a woman in a glitzy purple burqa when Pervez had come asking for yoghurt. “God will bless,” the veiled woman had answered in a muffled voice from behind her veil.

He had asked a jeans-toting couple when Pervez had sprinted to the tailor’s. “We’re sorry, uncle, God will bless.”

Now as the wizened man sat directly under the glare of the unforgiving sun, he held his rickety hand outstretched, hopeful for alms. But the only thing that fell on his papery palm was the cutting heat, and nothing else. No help, no aid, no blessing. God will bless, God will make it all better, they all told him—after all, they didn’t need to give him alms since so many people do already; surely the next man will leave a hundred rupee note in his hands. Besides, these beggars were all cheaters and frauds and a mafia. God doesn’t bless the wicked, and they shouldn’t either.

And so they all walked past this man old enough to be their father—old enough to be their grandfather—old enough to be their sage—his skin burnt and melting in the chaotic Karachi heat, his tattered rags only enough to veil his shameful parts but never near enough to veil his shame: he had no shame. When one was reduced to a mockery of all that was noble in the human species, to imploring for a morsel, to hoping for blessing and never receiving it, one’s quota of shame ran freakishly slim. It was a choice between dignity and survival—and hungry men can’t afford dignity.

Pervez looked on at the fascinating scene of life: men and women walking from one end of the stage to the other, walking out of their earthly doors, past the ancient man (God will help you, baba) and into the qinquis that carried them to their various destinations atop the rocky roads that lay ahead. None stopped or cared for they all hoped—and firmly believed—that God will help. For had Pervez not heard his own father extol in high words how the onus of sustenance was on the divine? When He creates, He prepares for provision—for who was feeding the beasts and birds then? They didn’t have to ask for alms. Thus the want of rizk in humans was never a human problem—to think so would have been too great a risk.

So they continued their sprightly walk, happy knowing that some divine omniscient hand was ever ready to help and that no coin need fall off their pockets. Pervez watched this forlorn farce play out for some time more, his hands crumpling and de-crumpling the twenty rupee note in his pocket. He could part with the note and make the men take note of childish benevolence that often puts them to shame to the point where everything prepubescent is labelled stupid—or he could sit in a qinqui, go to the mosque (to the mosque you must go, and nowhere else), and pray for the old man. He spent some time weighing the two options in his head, like he’d seen his father weigh the vegetables he bought from streetside vendors (you can never trust them, they’re frauds, and they cheat when they’re weighing). In the end, he did not mount a qinqui.

When he went back home, his parents knew. His parents weren’t great knowledgeable people, but they knew he hadn’t been to the mosque. And this was all the knowledge they needed. His uncle lived near the mosque, and he had not seen his nephew around for prayers, and he had informed his parents of as much. His father was ready, a thick stick in hand, standing sentry at the gate, waiting to mete out due punishment. The house that had been a harem would now change shape and metamorphose into a torture cell as it so often did, but while places of pleasure could not be places of prayer, they could both be places of pain and persecution. There was no hesitation now, no shying from the divine eye, no fear of civility leaking through the chinks in failed cultivation of moral uprightness. Pleasure and prayer and power and pain coalesced as the child walked in from his rendezvous, greeted not with hugs and endearment but with lashes and chastisement. But before he could break a bone, Pervez told his father he’d dispensed of the twenty rupees by giving them away to the old beggar who sat by the electric pole at the bus, the one that was told God will help by everyone who passed and passed away.

The dutiful disciplining ceased. His father kneeled down in front of him. Perhaps he was angry still, perhaps his reservoir of energy had run dry already—Pervez didn’t know, and he didn’t care. His father now launched into a lecture about frauds and cheaters, about how these old beggars are just healthy men pretending to be old so that they can kidnap little kids like Pervez, and when they kidnap them they beat the children black and blue and make them beg on the streets. These were dangerous men, his father said, dangerous men who wanted to hurt little boys. Pervez thought he understood that part alright—he didn’t want any more hurting than he already had. His father told him—sternly—that he should’ve gone to pray for these men to revert to the right path and be good, and that although Pervez did a good thing it was the wrong thing to do. Begging is looked down upon in the faith, his father said. If Pervez only listened to his father, he wouldn’t hurt him anymore. His father disciplined him because he loved him, his father said.

His father was lying. And Pervez knew that. But no matter, for Pervez had lied too: he hadn’t, after all, given the twenty rupee note to the old man. He had joined the boys in the ground in their game of cricket. And as he had passed the old man, he had stopped and said in a boyish voice: God will bless, baba. Pervez had decided he would pray for the old man later, for prayer—his uncle always said—was more powerful than anything in the world. “More powerful than money?” Pervez had once asked. “Yes, a lot more powerful than money,” his uncle had responded. Just two days before that the uncle had gobbled up his aunt’s inheritance and prayed for forgiveness. And so Pervez had gotten rid of the ridiculous idea of giving alms to the man when God could do it instead—everyone said so, and so did he: “God will bless, baba.”

And he had felt almost like his father when he’d done that. Back home now, massaging his bruised shoulder and licking the blood off his bruised lip, Pervez wondered if God had yet blessed the antique man. Just like his parents truly believed their omnipresent, omniscient God looked away when they entwined in their rawest carnality, Pervez now believed that God looked away when he lied for the greater good. Pervez had learned valuable lessons today: home was where you told lies, and the mosque was where you prayed and asked for forgiveness for those lies.

God and man exist simultaneously, after all, and after all this time.

– Noor Us Sabah Tauqeer