vegetable for so long and then not feeding himself properly for decades. The father will be taken to Mithi’s Civil Hospital. After six days, he will pass away. Aachar will now work for the merchant and his young son who will have now taken some interest in the business. The son has finished his degree from Sindh Univeristy, Jamshoro. But now the father has convinced him of the decent profit the vegetable and chilli trade brings to them.
So the son will set up another shop in Chachro, the nearby town. Aachar will help the son set up the new shop and spend two months in Chachro. Then he will return to Chelhar to work for the father again. Aachar will get married to a neighbour who is a distant relative. She will bear seven children, out of which two will die immediately after birth and the third in infancy due to malnutrition.
Aachar will live to see his two daughters married, one to a waiter in a roadside restaurant at the age of 15 and the other to a truck mechanic’s apprentice in Mithi at the age of 16. Aachar will die after the first attack of pneumonia at the age of 55 during a cold wave sweeping over the harsh desert of Thar.
Badshah will be born next month in a hamlet outside Matta, a small town in the valley of Swat. He will be the second child of Intikhab, who has become Intikhab Khan in the working class neighbourhood of Qasba Colony, Karachi. Badshah’s 20-year-old mother will die while giving birth to him and add another digit to the maternal mortality figures of Pakistan. Badshah will be nursed by his unmarried maternal aunt and fed by another woman in the hamlet who has just given birth to a baby girl.
Badshah’s elder sister is developing polio, which is affecting her legs. Their father, who could not afford to come to the village at the time of his son’s birth and his wife’s death, will come from Karachi for Eid now. After saying his prayers at his wife’s grave, he will come home to see his son. His father-in-law will ask him to marry his other daughter who is already taking care of the children. Badshah’s father will think for a day and then agree.
Badshah will then have six more siblings. One of them will be run over by a speeding truck and one will lose sight in one eye after a prolonged illness. The rest will be fine. Badshah, being the eldest brother, will go to school for two years. He will then drop out from school and work with his aunt, now his stepmother, in the small patch of land they have inherited but cannot even provide for food security of the family itself. Badshah’s father will come once a year by bus from Karachi, spend two weeks with the family, bring them cheap toys and candies as gifts, the only new shalwar suit for the year for his wife, impregnate his wife and go back.
This will go on for years till his father will develop ulcers and decided to come back to the village. At least, he will survive the urban violence in Karachi and come back to the village to die a natural death. What a luxury.
Upon his return, 16-year-old Badshah will be sent to Karachi with an uncle. He will get the same charpoy in the same quarter in Qasba Colony where his father slept. He will also inherit the cobbler’s box with a variety of brushes, laces, polishes, lotions, scissors, chisels, etc. He had already been taught a little by his father. But it was not enough. His father’s cousin in Karachi will teach him how to be a good cobbler. And he will learn fast.
Badshah will become Badshah Khan. He will start with polishing boots in the Zainab Market area while perfecting the cobbling skill in the evening, learning intently from his uncle. Badshah will get himself a cheap cell-phone connection and begin to speak to his aunt and father every week. He will also start sending them money through a package offered by the cell-phone company every month.
Badshah will work hard, make friends with some shopkeepers and street vendors who share the pavement with him. Badshah will start liking Karachi better than his village near Matta. He will fall in love with a girl in the neighbourhood whose father is an unskilled factory worker. He will convince his loving aunt and an increasingly irritated father that he wants to marry this girl who is not Pakhtun and speaks Urdu with a distinct lilt.
She will work in nearby North Nazimabad as a maid in a number of houses. Never paid enough and always tired, she will produce five children with Badshah. But Badshah will have to continue to send money back home in the village because he is the eldest son. After some years, the polluted water Badshah and his family are drinking for a long time will take a toll on his health. Badshah will die at the age of 45 after intense kidney pain. He would not see a doctor or go to a hospital not because he thought the pain would go away, but because he never had enough money.
Neither will Aachar die in a famine in Thar nor will Badshah be hit by a bullet of a target killer in Karachi. They belong to the majority that is neither killed in natural disasters nor in political violence and live the same lives as their parents – lives of poverty, dispossession, malnutrition and illness – and their next generations will continue to live the same life until we as a state and as a people perish under our own weight of systematic injustice.
The writer is a poet and author based in Islamabad.
Email: harris.khaliquegmail.com