by Aslam Kakar
Wiping his tears with the back of his hand, Salman stands in the doorway while his mother tries to pull him inside the room. “It is cold outside. You will get sick. I don’t have money to buy you medicine or take you to the doctor. Also, the food is getting colder. You need to eat,” she admonishes him. Facing the wall and sobbing his heart out, he does not say a word for a moment. After failing to get his attention, she looks at the starless, cloudy sky. “I will not go in until you promise to buy me a cricket bat tomorrow,” he whines at the mother who is lost in the sky’s vastness, feeling belittled for her negligible existence.
The room already feels colder, and she has to keep her other children and her mother-in-law warm. The porchless door leaves it bare open to the humongous, dark and cold night out. On rainy days and in snowy winters, one of the hardest battles for the family to fight is to protect the threshold from being flooded by muddy water. Because it is made of mud, the doorsill is destroyed every time it snows or rains. They build it up again, only for bad weather to demolish it over. The cycle, like Sisyphus’s, repeats itself, condemning them to eternal misery. In their world, going beyond temporary solutions to life’s simple problems is almost impossible. Here, in the periphery of civilization, life is modest and simple but laborious. Sometimes unbearable.
All of Salman’s friends in the village have cricket bats. When he plays with the boys, they let him use their bats. But, he hates being on their mercy and to curry favors with them. He wishes to be able to play whenever and wherever he wants, so that he won’t have to use the shovel handle for a bat at home. He envies them and thinks endlessly about getting one. He desires it more than anything in the world now. It is on his mind. It is his world. He sees himself swinging the bat in the mirror, like his favorite players on television at his cousin’s house. He is ready to give up food, heat and anything in protest. But, he does not realize that his opponent is atrocious and more significant than his mother. His enemy is her enemy, too.
She holds him by the arm and tries to pull him in again, but he frees himself from her grip. Feeling exhausted after a long struggle and wait, the mother finally gives up and goes in, closing the door behind her. She quickly peeks through the door one last time, hoping he comes in but fails again. Salman waits for more exhortations from her, but she does not call him back. “You are a disappointment. Why did he leave me alone to this mess? Son of a bitch abandoned me to a bunch of orphan schmucks,” he hears her in anger and frustration. She is used to expressing her helplessness like this, even years after his father died in an accident. He knows from the past that in such moments, she punishes all her children collectively, at least by reminding and reprimanding them for their wrongs earlier in the day or even from the past week.
Then silence prevails. After a while, she puts off the lantern, and the light reflection through the window disappears. This signals everyone is already in bed. With the door ajar, Salman gets a glimpse of the room. All he sees is burning coal inside the stove. He closes the door gently, avoiding to make any noise. His eyes are wet from tears, nose running and feet and hands cold from chilliness. He is also hungry, and hopes his mother saved some food for him. At this moment, he has been out for four hours, awaiting his demand to be fulfilled. With every passing moment into the night, it gets darker, scarier and colder. He looks inside the room again and finds the coal burned to ashes. All he sees this time is eye-straining darkness.
While standing in the doorway, it is no longer possible for him to resist the temperature. He urinates from the doorstep and goes inside, locking the door behind him. In the deafening silence and darkness, he finds his way to his bed in a corner by the stove. It has been a while before the stove fire vanished. Shivering, he feels some comfort in the warmth of the room, however he wishes an immediate relief from the cold that has entered his flesh and bones.
A few hours later, he feels pain in the chest along a headache. He is unsure if he had been asleep or in the grip of an intense fever that has made him feel numb. His nose begins to run, and worse yet he starts coughing. A constant cough wakes up his mother, who gives him two spoonfuls of cough syrup and gently scolds him for his stubbornness the previous night. She hopes it will put him to sleep, and a bowl of hot tea and bread at sunrise will make him feel better. She goes back to bed to rest for an hour before waking up again for the morning prayer.
Meanwhile, Salman’s cough increases. It wakes up his mother who has been half asleep and half awake, wondering what she can do to help him. She regrets blaming the sick child for her life’s misfortune. “He did not kill him. Why blame him? He is also suffering from his loss. Maybe he just can’t realize.” A chain of quick thoughts crosses her mind. The hour goes by swiftly as the call for prayer rises from the mosque down the road. Soon after the call for prayer comes the crowing of roosters in the front yard. She wakes up and gets out of the bed.
After the prayer, she makes tea and serves it with the leftover bread from last night. Shaking from pain, Salman breaks a few morsels from the meal, dunks them in the bowl and sips the tea. Being unable to sit for long, he goes back to bed immediately. His mother realizes that her son’s situation is worsening, but she worries about what to do. Taking him to the doctor is not within her reach. She has some money, but it is not enough. And even if it is enough, she fears how they will survive the winter ahead. After her husband’s death years back, no one has had a job in the family. Whatever she has now comes from Zakat, charity from faithful relatives and the wealthy in the village.
However, it takes little for the mother to forget all else in the face of danger to her child’s life. She gets him ready and takes him on the only bus to a doctor in a nearby city. In the bus, she keeps worrying about the doctor’s fee. When they reach the clinic, the doctor turns out to be an acquaintance of her brother. This gives her confidence, but she does not ask for help yet, hoping the treatment does not cost beyond her means. The doctor tells her that Salman has a very high fever due to a severe chest infection.
He warns if they wait for a little more, he may die. “The treatment,” he says, “costs fifty dollars,” but Salman’s mother does not have the full amount. She has thirty dollars. She requests the doctor if she can pay the charges in parts. Back in the village, she can buy stuff at the local shop and can pay the money later. The owner knows her well and trusts her.
But, the city is different. Here she can’t negotiate a bargain with a stranger. But because the doctor is a family friend, not a complete stranger, and her child lies on the verge of death, she hopes he will understand. Upon her request, the doctor agrees and gives Salman an injection and gives her some medicine for home. The mother and son get on a pickup truck back towards the village. She wraps him in her shawl to protect him from cold air. “I will buy you a bat when I have extra money,” she tells him quietly. Salman had almost forgotten about it.