Of Smokeless Fire by A.A. Jafri (i wanna iguana read aloud TXT) 📕

He stopped doing shit work altogether and found part-time employment at a decrepit restaurant called Café de Jamadar in his own neighbourhood. He could do a non-sweeping job only inside this enclave. Beyond it, cleaning toilets was the only fate of a bhangi. Society would not even allow him to enter a restaurant, let alone toil there. They were like lepers, ostracized and abandoned in their colony.

Joseph had also developed an addiction for American action movies, squandering all his earnings to satisfy this obsession. When his earnings ran out, or when he was a few paise short, he stole from his mother, borrowed from Mansoor, or begged Mehrun. Indian and Pakistani films were his first love, but American movies had more action and violence, and the censored sex scenes satisfied his sex-starved imagination.

It was a well-known fact in those days that some of the seedy movie theatres often inserted two-minute cuts from X-rated movies in between perfectly normal film scenes. Why those theatres were never shut down by the Censor Board remained a mystery to the aficionados. Known as totay, these X-rated clips popped up abruptly, and completely unannounced, in between a sequence. In Ben-Hur, for instance, the chariot race would suddenly be interrupted by a scene from what appeared to be a German porn flick. And when John Wayne snatched the gun from Mickey Kuhn’s hand in Red River and said, ‘Don’t ever trust anybody until you know ’em,’— a naked, ageing Casanova would appear, uninvited, trying to seduce a half-naked English porn star. Joseph figured out the time and the day when these bits would suddenly appear. And so, he became a frequent patron of these movie theatres. One unintended effect of watching so many movies was that Joseph became a diehard fan of John Wayne. One day, he appeared at the Kashana wearing a cowboy hat and a plastic gun holster over his dhoti. When Mansoor saw him, he cracked up, to which John Wayne Joseph replied in a thick Punjabi accent: ‘Howdee, mainu pardoner!’

Once, Premier Talkies, where the totays were shown with regular frequency, was screening Ronald Reagan’s Cattle Queen of Montana. After the scene where Barbara Stanwyck is putting on her blouse behind a boulder and a young Ronald Reagan is watching her from his horse, the film projectionist introduced an erotic scene from a Greek movie, albeit one that had no nudity. When the scene was over and the feature film restarted, the people felt cheated. They began shouting and protesting, demanding their money back, for they had been denied a titillating sex scene. Joseph egged the audience on, complaining that the scene was not even in English, as if that would have made any difference. Suddenly, he saw a familiar face amongst all the men shouting in the hall. It was Khaleel Khan ‘Athanni’, sitting in the middle row. At first, Athanni did not see Joseph, but his continued stare made him conscious and he turned around. Joseph did not know if Athanni recognized him, but he saw him quickly exiting. He followed Athanni. Wearing dark glasses, Athanni tried to mix in with the pedestrians and began to walk fast, but Joseph walked faster. It was time to embarrass and humiliate him, to exact revenge for all the contempt Mansoor Babu, Mehrun and he had endured from that harami.

‘Salaam, Athanni Sahib!’ Joseph shouted as he caught up with him.

‘What do you want?’

‘Oh, nothing, Sahib. I just saw you watching the totay, so I thought I better convey my salaam.’ Joseph smirked, scratching his neck.

‘Are you mad? What totay? I . . . I . . . Get lost.’

Khaleel Khan quickly hailed a taxi and sped away, leaving the smiling Joseph in a fog of acrid exhaust fumes.

*

Joseph was fed up of everything. He felt tortured hearing the sound of the wind, breathing in the pungent smell of the food his mother was cooking, his mind was constantly venting rage, wanting to shatter the emptiness, to break things. He felt uprooted in his own neighbourhood. Nights of arguments with his mother turned into shouting matches—things thrown against the floor, meals dumped outside, abuses hurled. These were moments when Pyaro could hardly recognize her son and the person he had become. As for Joseph, he could not take it any longer. So one night, just to get away, he set off towards his newly discovered hang-out in the city’s red-light district on Napier Road, fondly called Sona Mandi, or the Golden Market, by its diehard patrons.

The road was named after Sir Charles Napier, a general in the British Army, who brought Sindh under the rule of the British East India Company in 1843. Two years after the conquest, Napier heard rumours that his troops were frequenting Karachi’s boy brothels. Becoming obsessed with the ‘corrupting effect’ the brothels were having on his troops, he asked Sir Richard Burton, a secret agent and the English translator of The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, to investigate the matter. If the rumours were found to be true, Napier had declared, he would shut the brothels down. After his investigation, Burton concluded that Napier’s hunch was correct and wrote a report that was so detailed and graphic that many who read it came to believe that Burton was a closeted homosexual. Napier got so incensed with what he read in Burton’s report that he gave orders to destroy all the brothels and to rid them of the transsexuals, whom he called ‘beasts’. In a remarkably ironic twist of fate, the man who wanted to clean up the brothels ended up having his name forever associated with them.

Napier Road had always been eclipsed by the famous Heera Mandi, or Diamond Market, the red-light district of Lahore. So, in an act of one-upmanship, the regulars of Napier Road began calling it Sona Mandi and the prostitutes they visited, dulhanain ek raat ki, brides for one night.

Sona Mandi was located in an old, decrepit part