Basharat thought the man must be crazy, so he turned away. But then the man said quietly, ‘Son, you have a mole on your pelvis and a wart in your right armpit.’ This sent shivers down Basharat’s spine, and he immediately took off his shoes because what the man had said was true.
A short distance away the third-grade boys were exercising beneath a banyan tree. They were doing push-ups. When they extended their arms the very first time, they cried out in pain, and after they dropped back to the ground only two boys had enough strength to do it a second time. The rest lay there like lizards sunning on a rock. They turned their heads and looked helplessly toward the PE teacher who barked at them, ‘What? Does your mamma give you watered-down milk?’
The lower half of the reed mat covering the doorway was in tatters, leaving its coarse threads hanging limply. The first candidate was the guy from Aligarh, and they called out his name the way they summon plaintiffs and defendants in a court case — I mean, by surname first, and so loud you would have thought there were as many as two hundred candidates sitting in a line extending two miles into the distance. The candidate jumped down from the tree as though sprung from a catapult. He landed with a thud. He readjusted his sun hat and was about to enter when the servant stopped him. He asked for proof that he had donated to the orphanage, then had him hand over his pack of Passing Show cigarettes, of which only two remained. Then he had him take off his shoes, and they entered as though approaching the Almighty Himself. After fifty minutes, they came out. The servant went over to a gong that hung from a rocking horse next to the door, and he struck it so that everyone in town (as well as the three candidates) would know that the first interview was finished. The boys milling around outside clapped loudly. Then the candidate from Allahabad was called in; he erased his mandala from the sand and rushed inside. After fifty minutes, the servant came out and struck the gong twice with such force that all the peacocks in town began crying out. (Each interview lasted the same fifty minutes as a class period.) The servant winked at Basharat and motioned for him to enter.
3.
The Black Hole of Dhiraj Ganj
When Basharat went inside, he couldn’t make out anything. Since there was neither a window nor a skylight, the only way light got into the room was through a little round hole in the wall. Gradually outlines appeared from out of the darkness, and he could see the walls, whose plaster was made from both yellow mud and fresh cow dung into which dried mustard stalks and chaff had been mixed to strengthen the compound. The plaster’s natural golden varnish sparkled in the dim light. In the corner to his right there were two beads of light. Suddenly they began moving toward him, and this frightened him until he realized it was a cat in search of some mouse. To his left, there was a really strange cot: it was four feet high, its legs were so thick they looked like the trunks of trees, and whoever had made it hadn’t even bothered to shear off the bark. This is where three of the selection committee’s members sat with their legs dangling. Nearby, another member was sitting on a reed stool with no backrest. Maulvi Muzaffar was sitting with his back toward the door on a reed chair that had no padding left on the armrests, and so its bare reed fibers were showing through. A very cheerful-looking man was sitting on an iron chair. He had turned it around so he could sit with his chest pressed against the back and his chin propped on top of it. His skin was so dark that the only thing Basharat could see were his teeth. This man was the County Treasurer and the chairman of the committee.
One member hung his fez on top of one of the cot’s legs, but when the cat came over to bat its dangling tassels, the man put the hat back on. Everyone was cooling themselves with fans made of date palm branches. Moli Mujjan pushed the stem of his fan down the neck of his shervani to scratch his back and when he brought it back out he sniffed it to see if it smelled. The County Treasurer’s fan was fringed with red lace and had a small mirror in the middle.
For the candidates, there was a stool with a kidney-shaped hole — the standard type in those days. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out the purpose of this hole. In the summer, some people put an earthenware water pitcher or flask on it so that the beads of evaporation oozing from the pitcher would seep through the hole and cool the pitcher’s bottom. Throughout the interview, Basharat couldn’t decide whether he was shaking from being nervous or whether it was the stool itself that was shaking.
The County Treasurer was sipping a sweet lassi, and the rest of the men were smoking hookahs. Everyone had taken off their shoes, and if Basharat had been informed about this state of affairs, he certainly would have made sure to wear clean socks. The man on the reed stool sat with his left foot resting on his right knee and had interwoven the fingers of his right hand among the toes of his left foot and was playing a game of push-em-pull-em. A tarnished spittoon was being passed around. The room smelled of a curious combination of the hookah-smoke, the Benares tobacco in the paan, the earthenware water pitcher, the watermelon rinds tossed into the corner, the previous candidate’s sweet-straw cologne, and the wall-plaster’s cow dung. A smell wafted over this that you couldn’t be too sure about: was it that of the homemade shoes worn into everyone’s feet, or the rotten stench of their feet coming from their shoes?
The small round hole in the wall was of an uncertain nature as well. It was difficult to decide whether it was there to supply light or just to supply a little contrast to the shades of darkness that shrouded the room; whether it was there to let the room’s trapped smoke out or to let the dust outside in; whether it was there to provide a means to look out at the world or to provide a means for all the Peeping Toms to look in. Skylight, ventilator, spy-hole, chimney, window, and porthole — Basharat thought it was the most multipurpose hole in all of Asia, and so overworked that it suffered from ontological confusion, which in turn led to its not being able to do anything well.
Every five minutes a new face was at the hole. Outside, one boy bent over so that his buddy could climb onto his shoulders and look in. They remained in this position until the boy giving support got tired. When his legs gave out and his waist started to wobble, he would yell out to his friend, ‘Hey! Get down! It’s my turn now. Let me see!’
The hole was also a passage for oxygen and insults. Long story short, Moli Mujjan suffered from asthma. When a coughing fit overtook him, and he felt as though he couldn’t breathe, he rushed over and stuck his mouth against the hole. Once he refreshed his lungs, he intoned majestically, ‘God be praised!’ then launched into a cursing rampage against the boys.
A little while later the sun changed its position in the sky, and a bright beam of light shot straight through the hole into the room and illuminated the smoke dervishes and dancing dust motes. What a vision! On the left, on a shelf set into the wall, there were balls that the theology students had made for drying the piss off the ends of their penises. These were arranged one on top of the other so neatly that they would have looked like peda sweets from the market in Badayun if only they had flies swarming all over them!
On the right wall, there was a framed photo of King George V, over which hung a shrivelled marigold garland. Beneath this were two more photos — one of Mustafa Kamal Pasha and the other of Maulana Muhammand Ali Jauhar, who was wearing a loose, long-sleeved robe and a sable-fur cap decorated with the moon and stars. Between these was a large photo of Moli Mujjan with a framed appreciation certificate beneath it from all the teachers and staff congratulating him on making it through a bout of cholera and wishing him the best for all times, a certificate that earned them the pay he had withheld for the five previous months.