Comfort and joy

Sitting in the darkness of the auditorium of the Dominican Convent School in Bahawalpur just before Christmas I, along with several hundred others, watched and listened as children sang carols, acted out tableaux, danced and recited. Some were confident, others gauche but all had a light in their eyes that said this was a happy moment for them. There will have been weeks of preparation, dresses to be sewn, props and scripts acquired and learned, and days of rehearsal. It all came together in two hours, the principal spoke at the end as she always does and the audience went off into a foggy cold night, another year about to come full circle.

There was shopping to do on the way back home, a stop at the bakery that does particularly good brown bread, some cakes for the family and nimco to nibble as films were watched over the holiday. And there were beggars.

Beggars were no surprise to me when I first came to Pakistan. I had travelled and worked widely in some of the poorer parts of the world, and like most of us, I was virtually beggar-blind by the time I settled in to live here permanently.

But just occasionally and almost fleetingly, there would be a moment of awareness.

A child with a tangle of limbs on a freezing winter morning at the Bahawalpur railway station. Warmly muffled, I was reading a book in the unending wait for the train and I did not notice him as he crawled to me. He plucked at the leg of my trousers and it is with shame that I recall my instinctive reaction being to kick him away. His elbows and knees were raw and bloodied. He was dressed in rags and shivering. A scrap of life that if he saw forward at all, it was to unending misery and pain.

I got him some food from the stall. He ate ravenously. Unzipping my bag, I dug out a warm jacket and managed to get his twisty limbs into it and all zipped up. People watched me impassive. At the last, I gave him a hundred rupees and he dragged himself off. I was there another hour and nobody else moved a muscle to help the child.

A woman at a bus stand. Clearly mentally ill. Blistering midsummer heat. She was barely clad and her upper legs visible through the rips in her clothing. Young men had gathered round her, touching her, sometimes intimately. My wife approached them and asked what they thought they were doing. ‘We are her fans,’ they said. ‘We love her.’ Passengers watched in the rippling heat. Entertained, perhaps. The woman, out of her senses as she was, clearly was not enjoying herself. A rummage in the Missus’ bag produced an old shalwar-kameez and a visit to the toilet of an adjacent chai-khana got the woman, at least, modestly covered. Our bus was leaving. People looked at us as if we were as mad as the woman we had helped.

A crowded bazaar and I was there to buy fish for supper from my favourite fishmonger. In the ebb and flow, there was a woman carrying a child of perhaps two or three. It had a bandaged left hand — strange how tiny details remain — but there was something about it that looked odd. If you have ever seen bloodstained dressings, you will know one when you see one.

It was a fake. The child was not injured but was being used as a begging tool. I cursed and waved the woman away. She spat on the ground.

And there were beggars outside the bakery where I went to buy my bread and cakes. The children’s carols were still in my head, their merriment and sense of fun a warm memory on a chilly evening.

I pushed through the knot of beggars and bought what I had came for and was going back to the rickshaw and saw the beggars through the glass door of the bakery. They were looking at me, the cakes they could never buy. I gave them my box of cakes and fifty rupees. Comfort and joy. Happy New Year.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th, 2013.

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