The Gray Cotton Shawl

She will wrap herself in her big gray cotton shawl and fold her hands across her chest before getting off the university bus. With small steady steps and her gaze downwards she will walk home.

Kashmira is the bastard child of Pakeezah and Indir. After a childhood full of unsettled bounces from one household to another she now lives with her maternal grandmother in a small one bedroom apartment near Teen Talwar. Her everyday routine includes a walk from her Bath Island neighbourhood to catch the bus to Karachi University. The university is nestled in the other end of the city and the newly built highway has cut her commuting time by a fraction. This bus’s exterior is painted with bright colors and images of the Khyber Pass in all sorts of sizes. The stocky bus conductor shouts in his hoarse voice to announce the destination, but today the bus is nearly empty and she is the only female body in the front quarter of the bus reserved for women. He sits across from Kashmira, legs apart, hands hidden under the folds of his kurta, he grins showing his paan stained teeth. Kashmira feels her shoulders tighten and sits on the seat’s edge. Teen Talwar, the white marble monument of three bonded swords representing Faith, Unity and Discipline and now tarnished by political posters, is still half an hour away. Kashmira commutes for two hours on a regular basis. Every morning she leaves her house at 7:35 and reaches the bus point at the Teen Talwar at 7:55. Then she waits for her university bus to show up. Never being on time the bus sometimes reaches early and sometimes late, and is always bloated with students.

“This strike. Any children in your class?” The conductor asks Kashmira rubbing his fudge colored hands on his shalwar. The conductor wants to practice his English with Kashmira. His two children enrolled in an English medium school encourage him to do so. He cannot afford their tuition and has to do errands on the side to meet the school costs. He makes the most money during exam period. He has an arrangement with a university peon and distributes exam questions on the bus. Each question paper brings him a thousand rupee and his wife’s affection.

“Bhai Sahib, why is the bus going so slow?” Comes a query from the back of the bus with men scattered between empty seats.

“ Am I the Prime Minister? How should I know?” He shouts over to the back but not leaving his kohl stained gaze off Kashmira’s bosom.

Kashmira drags her cotton gray shawl down to her stomach to cover her upper body. Many times she had thought of buying a veil and using it as means to ward off unwanted attention. It is not easy to be a young woman in this enormous city, Karachi. Every step to accomplish any task is laden with barbwires. Last week when she went to inquire about sudden disconnection of her phone line, she stood in the burning sun for two hours with an elderly man behind her who kept brushing his hand on her rear.

“How many children were there?” The conductor asks crossing his legs.
If Kashmira had the luxury of money then she would have told the bus driver to let her off the bus and then taken a rickshaw home but her grandmother could hardly afford her education. A taxi or a rickshaw was wishing for the moon.

“Not many,” she replies and turns her thin body towards the window. The April sun glares into her eyes and makes her cringe. Her kurta is wet with humidity and sticks to her back. With her sweaty hands she holds the horizontal steel bars on the window giving her a distorted view of the world outside. The lack of traffic on the road, makes it seem like Iftar time in Ramadan. This deserted look does not suit Karachi where everyone is in a hurry to reach somewhere. The roads lacking the sounds of disoriented car horns seem to Kashmira like roads awaiting a funeral procession. The MQM’s political strike has paralyzed the whole city, and if it weren’t for her mid-term she would not have stepped outside her home.

When Kashmira was a small girl she lived with her father. She hardly got to see him since he was always traveling. Sometimes when he drove his truck to Lahore then she would not see him for months. When he made shorter trips to Hyderabad then, too, he would not come home for days and she would be alone with her paternal grandmother, who resented her for being Pakeezah’s daughter. A Muslim woman’s daughter. She never said that out loud to her but made her wear a bindi every time they left the house. She was forbidden to eat meat at home and never tasted it until her school friend Hina coerced her into eating it one day. This was exactly the kind of thing her paternal grandmother was afraid of and so, she discouraged her to mingle or play with other Muslim children in their apartment building compound. The day she ate Haleem, a spicy dish with shredded beef at her school canteen she threw up in the school bus. Her grandmother thought she was ill with food poisoning and made her stay at home for two days. In the two days she spent in the room she shared with her grandmother, sweating on the bed with rising fever, she saw colorful trucks with designs of leaves, flowers and woman’s eyes on her cream colored walls. She imagined that these trucks brought her plates and plates of Haleem.

She lived in her father’s house till he got married to a woman he brought along with him from Lahore. Her grandmother threatened suicide by closing herself in the kitchen and sprinkling petrol over her nylon white sari. She shouted from the kitchen for Kashmira to bring her a match box, but her father held her shoulder in his hand’s tight clasp and did not let her move. Out of desperation her grandmother called her father’s wife a whore and a raandi. She shouted so loud that all the neighbours heard it too. Her father’s wife got fidgety took out her pack of cigarettes from her purse and lit a cigarette. This was the first time Kashmira had seen a woman smoke. It was like the first time she had seen a snake in the temple. She wanted to scream but no voice came out. All she could feel was hot air going in through her nostrils and exiting through her mouth. She thought about this incident quite a lot. It had stuck in her mind like molten candle wax on a marble surface.

“ Abhay uloo kaye pathay,” shouts the conductor to an old man cycling alongside the bus and touching and thumping it for support. The conductor takes this opportunity to get closer to Kashmira and leans on her window to look at the old man, the folds and flares of his flowing shalwar tucked under his buttocks. The cyclist ignores him and keeps on cycling, as he desires. Kashmira moves back on the red vinyl seat so that the conductor’s pudgy chest does not brush against her body. The conductor realizes he has more available space, and so, aligns his body next to the window until his legs touch Kashmira’s knees. He stays there for a minute and shouts curses at the cyclist and then sits on the empty seat next to Kashmira.

It wasn’t everyday the conductor got an opportunity to sit next to a young woman. All day long he paced up and down the bus shouting destinations and giving change. From the day he saw Kashmira he felt young, a man with butterflies in his stomach. Her smile reminded him of monsoon. Rain drops falling from the sky like a broken pearl necklace.

He imagined himself as Waheed Murad with a sultry heroine in his arms; a woman who desired him so absolutely that he could not resist her. He knew his wife did not desire him. At night when she came to sleep she would not move from the corner of the bed. Her body never touched his. And when she talked it would be about their two children or who bought a new color television or a refrigerator in their housing complex. Last night she told him how much she desired that they had a satellite dish that caught all English channels so that their children could be better in their English diction. When he told her of the ridiculous nature of her demand she sat on the bed and cried for an hour. Even though his wife’s requests were expensive, he eventually agreed to them and then pinned her down on the bed and entered her twice.

“ So what do you study?” The conductor asks in a shaky voice. Sitting close to Kashmira makes him feel nervous. He takes out a small brown paper bag from his Kurta’s side pocket and puts it on Kashmira’s lap. She jerks back.

“Don’t you eat paan? It’s the sweet one.” He says with a grin showing his gums stained with its red juice. Kashmira picks the brown bag up from her lap and holds it in the air, hoping that he will take it back. The conductor does not move his hands and looks at her as if he is basking in the winter’s sun. Kashmira turns her body toward the window again, leaving the paper bag on the floor. The bus is moving faster now and the bus driver has put in a cassette of film songs. His selection of songs is mostly tragic. Kashmira has never seen him without a cigarette on the edge of his lips, grease in his gray hair.

The conductor stands up from the seat and goes to the back of the bus. Kashmira looks at her watch. The bus just whizzed by Hotel Marriott and now stands at the traffic signal before the Clifton Bridge. After crossing the bridge Teen Talwar will be just three minutes away and then she will walk home. Her grandmother will have her lentils with crushed onions ready. After food her grandmother will pull the curtains together and they will both take a nap for an hour before children from their neighborhood would start piling in for math tutoring.

Kashmira closes her eyes to get some rest. For a minute she thinks about her father driving the truck and waving goodbye. How she stood on the balcony and waved back vigorously with tears dropping from her eyes.

The bus takes a deep cough and halts. A brown jeep has stopped in front of the bus. Four men get on the bus carrying hockey sticks and Kalashnikovs. Kashmira pulls her legs towards her face as the men start breaking the glass windows and the shards fall on the floor and her seat. A tall man runs towards the conductor and grabs him by his kurta’s collar, slaming him into one of the empty seats. He then slams his boot heel on the conductors’s stomach and eyes. The conductor folds his hands and in a weak voice asks for mercy. The same man then goes to the bus driver and holds him by his collar, but pushes him down on his seat as his cell phone starts ringing. The men make their exit walking over the broken glass. After a few a minutes the passengers raise their heads and look at each other. The conductor staggers from the back into the front of the bus and tells everyone to stay calm. Words could hardly leave his lips and he stands holding a steel railing.

The bus driver starts the bus and speeds it over the bridge. Kashmira has never seen the university bus go so fast, even when the driver has raced the bus in competition with his other driver friends. With the breeze from the open window touching her face she sees the Teen Talwar getting near. She bends down and picks up the brown bag covered with pentagons and hexagons of glass. She shakes it and stands. Walks to the conductor. As the bus stops at her destination she hands the bag back to him. Wrapping herself in her big gray cotton shawl. Folds her hands tightly across her chest. She step downs the bus stairs.