Iqbal Read online
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2001 by Edizioni EL
English language translation copyright © 2003 by Ann Leonori
First published in Italian in 2001 as Storia di Iqbal by Edizioni EL
First U.S. edition 2003
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Book design by O’Lanso Gabbidon
The text for this book is set in Aldine 721.
Printed in the United States of America
6 8 10 9 7 5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
D’Adamo, Francesco.
Iqbal / written by Francesco D’Adamo; translated by Ann Leonori.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: A fictionalized account of a Pakastani child who escaped from bondage in a carpet factory and went on to help liberate other children like him until his tragic death at the age of thirteen.
ISBN 0-689-85445-5
eISBN 978-1-4391-0678-5
1. Masih, Iqbal, 1982-1995—Juvenile fiction. [1. Masih, Iqbal, 1982-1995—Fiction. 2. Child labor—Fiction. 3. Child abuse—Fiction. 4. Rug and carpet industry—Pakistan—fiction.]
I. Leonori, Ann. II. Title.
PZ7 .D1273Iq 2003
[Fic]—dc21 2002153498
For Annarita
Content
Introduction
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Epilogue
Introduction
All over the world and throughout history, children have been a source of labor. They have always had their share of work. In homes or in fields, they have contributed to the survival of their families or to the good of the community. In countries moving from agriculture to manufacturing, child labor is considered essential to successful development, and children have been present in virtually every field, workshop, and factory.
Today, more than two hundred million children between the ages of five and seventeen are “economically active” in the world. About seventy-three million of these are under ten years of age, and almost six million children are working in conditions of “forced and bonded labor.” Bonded labor is a system in which a person works for a preestablished period of time to pay off a debt. Many of America’s early colonists started out as indentured servants, receiving their passage to the colonies in return for a number of years of labor, after which they acquired their liberty and a grant of land.
In many countries, bonded child labor is considered an indispensable part of the economic system. When families are in debt, they “rent,” or bond, their children, who can be as young as four or five, to work for “masters,” who have complete control over the children’s lives until the debt is paid, and who can even send the children on to other masters. In Pakistan, where Iqbal takes place, industries such as brick-making and carpet-making depend on child labor. The brick-making industry employs whole families, small children working alongside their parents in dangerous conditions.
Carpet-making is particularly dependent on children and their manual dexterity: small fingers can be taught to work quickly to tie the thousands of knots necessary to make a carpet. Working conditions are usually very poor. The children, often underfed, work from dawn to dusk, squatting for long hours on low benches in front of their looms, breathing dust and lint. Many of them are chained to their looms. There is no time for play and little time for rest. They are invisible to the outside world.
Iqbal is a fictional account about a real person, Iqbal Masih, and his crusade to liberate bonded laborers. The narrator is a young girl, Fatima, whose life was forever changed by his courage.
One
“Yes, I knew Iqbal. I think about him often. I like to. I feel I owe it to him. You see, for Iqbal I was not invisible. I existed, and he made me free. So here is his story. As I remember it. As I knew him.”
The house of our master, Hussain Khan, was in the outskirts of Lahore, not far from the dusty, dry countryside where flocks of sheep from the north grazed.
It was a big house, half stone, half sheet iron, facing a dirty courtyard containing a well, an old Toyota van, and a canopy of reeds that protected the bales of cotton and wool. Across the courtyard from the house was a long building, the carpet factory, where fourteen of us worked. We had all been bonded to Hussain Khan to pay off debts our families had contracted with local moneylenders. The building had a tin roof and a dirt floor, so it was hot in the summer and cold in the winter.
In the corner at the back of the courtyard, half-hidden by thorn bushes and weeds, you could just see a rusty iron door. Behind the door was a short, steep stairway that led down to the Tomb.
Work began half an hour before dawn, when the master’s wife, dressed in her bathrobe and slippers, crossed the courtyard in the uncertain light of the fading night and brought us a round loaf of chapati bread and some dal, lentil soup. We all ate together, greedily dipping our bread into the large bowl on the ground, while we chatted incessantly of the dreams we had had during the night.
My grandmother and my mother used to say that dreams come from an unknown area of heaven, far far away, and they descend to earth when men call them. They can bring pain or comfort, joy or desperation, or sometimes they have no meaning and bring nothing. But it’s not necessarily true that only bad men receive evil dreams and silly men empty ones. Who are we, after all, to understand the ways of heaven? What’s really bad, my grandmother would say, is to receive no dreams. It’s like not receiving the warmth of someone who is thinking of us even if they are far away.
I hadn’t dreamed for months. I suspect many of us had stopped dreaming, but we were afraid to admit it: We felt so alone in the mornings. So we invented them, and they were always lovely dreams, full of light and color and memories of home. We competed to see who could invent the most fantastic ones, speaking very fast with full mouths, until the mistress said, “Enough already! Enough!”
Then we were allowed to pass—one by one—behind the filthy curtain that hid the Turkish toilet at the back of the big room where our looms and benches stood in rows. The first ones to go were those who had slept chained by their ankles to their looms. The master called them numskulls, because they worked slowly and poorly. They got the colored yarns mixed up or made mistakes in the pattern (the worst possible error), or they cried too loudly over the blisters on their fingers.
The numskulls weren’t very bright. Everybody else knew that all you had to do is take the knife we used for working and cut open the blister. The liquid drips out and it hurts for a while, but in time the skin grows back tougher, so you don’t feel anything anymore. You just have to know how to bear the wait. Those of us who weren’t chained sometimes felt sorry for the numskulls, but sometimes we teased them. Usually they were the new workers, just arrived, who hadn’t learned that the only way we could become free was to work very hard and very fast, to erase each and every line on our small slates, until there were none left and we could return home.
Like the others, I had my own little s
late hanging above the loom I worked on.
The day I arrived, many years before, Hussain Khan had taken a clean slate and had made some signs on it. “This is your name.”
“Yes, sir.”
“This is your slate. Nobody can touch it. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then he drew many other lines, one next to the other, as straight as the hair on the back of a frightened dog, and every group of four had a line through it.
“Can you count?” the master asked.
“Almost up to ten,” I responded.
“Look,” Hussain Khan said, “this is your debt. Every line is a rupee. I’ll give you a rupee for every day you work. That’s fair. Nobody would pay you more. Ask anyone you want: Everyone will say that Hussain Khan is a good and fair master who gives you what you deserve. And every day at sunset, I’ll erase one of these lines, right in front of your eyes. You’ll feel proud, and your parents will feel proud, because it will be the fruit of your work. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered again, but it wasn’t true. I hadn’t understood. I studied those mysterious lines, thick as trees in a forest, but I couldn’t distinguish my name from the debt. It was as though they were the same thing.
“When all the lines are erased,” Hussain Khan added, “when you see this slate wiped completely clean, then you’ll be free and you’ll be able to return home.”
I never saw a clean slate, neither mine nor one of my companions’.
After the numskulls returned from the toilet behind the curtain and were chained to their looms, the rest of us were free to use the toilet and to splash some water on our faces. There was a small window high up in the wall, and through it you could see the open sky and just barely glimpse the branches of a flowering almond tree. Every morning I stayed an extra minute and tried desperately to grasp the old wooden frame and to pull myself up so that I could look outside. I was ten years old then, small and delicate as I still am, and I never even managed to touch the edge of the window. And yet, every day I felt that I had reached a little bit higher—perhaps a “nothing,” only a fraction of an inch—but I was sure that soon I would be able to hoist myself up and lean out just far enough to touch the bark of the almond tree through the open air.
Of course, if I ever did manage to reach through the window or even to wriggle out, I would just find myself in the garden next door and Hussain Khan’s wife would come to get me, brandishing her stick and crying, “You, little ragbag! You ungrateful little viper!” I would end up in the Tomb for at least three days, perhaps for more. That’s what would probably happen.
But still, every morning I tried.
I had been working for Hussain Khan for three years, and I had never been put in the Tomb. Some of the other children were envious, and said I was Hussain Khan’s pet and that’s why he didn’t punish me. It wasn’t true. I was never punished because I worked quickly and well. I ate what they gave me without complaint, and when the master was around I kept silent, not like some, who answered back. I’ll admit that sometimes the master did pat my head and say, “Little Fatima, my little Fatima,” but all the while I trembled. I was frightened and wanted to disappear, to hide. Hussain Khan was fat, with a black beard and small eyes. His hands were oily from palm oil and left a greasy mark on whatever he touched.
Some nights, when I was still able to dream, I imagined Hussain Khan sneaking up in the dark to where I slept next to the loom. I could hear his heavy breathing and the smell of smoke on his jacket; I could hear the sound of his feet on the dusty earth. He would caress me, saying, “Little Fatima.” The next morning, hidden behind the dirty curtain at the back of the room, I would examine my body to see if there were signs of oil. There were none. It was only a nightmare.
Work began at sunrise. The mistress clapped her hands three times and we all sat down at our looms. After a moment we began to work rhythmically, tying the knots, beating them down. While we were working we were forbidden to stop, to talk, or to let our minds wander. We could only stare at the countless colored threads, from which we had to choose the right one to insert into the carpet pattern. The master had assigned each of us a pattern.
As the morning passed, the air filled with heat, dust, and flying lint, and the sound of the looms slipped into the voice of the awakening city. The motors of old cars and loaded trucks, the braying of the donkeys, the shouts of men, and the cries of the vendors in the nearby market—all these grew louder as the day came to life, as Lahore came out into the streets. When my arms and shoulders started aching, I would briefly turn my head toward the door to the courtyard and sunlight, and I would guess how much time remained before my only pause of the day. My hands worked on their own, out of habit. They chose the threads, pulled the knots. Again and again. They passed the weft, beat it down with the comb, then started knotting. Again and again. That evening Hussain Khan would measure my work. He’d judge whether it was up to standards, if it was made carefully, and then he’d erase one of the lines on my slate—a rupee for a day’s work.
He had been erasing those lines for three years, and they were still all there, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. Sometimes I even thought there were more of them, but that wasn’t possible—the lines on the slate couldn’t be like the weeds in my father’s garden that grew overnight and crowded the crops.
When we finally stopped for lunch we were dulled by fatigue. We dragged ourselves out into the courtyard and sat in the sun around the well to eat our chapati and vegetables and drink water, because our throats were dry and full of lint. Very few of us had enough energy to talk or laugh. Our break lasted an hour, but our hunger a good deal longer. Then we went back into the workroom, while Hussain Khan and his wife retired into their house to escape the heat of the afternoon. For a few hours there was no need to supervise us. Nobody had the courage to run away and anyway we couldn’t not work. In the evening the master’s measuring tape would reveal to the last centimeter how we had spent our time.
Not enough work done, no rupee, no line erased from our slates; we knew it well.
This was my life for three years. The first months I thought a lot about my family—my mother, my brothers and sisters—our home, the countryside, the buffalo that pulled the plow, the sweet laddu my mother made with chickpea flour, the desserts and almonds that we ate on feast days. But as time went on these memories faded like old, worn carpets.
That is, until the day Iqbal arrived.
Two
Iqbal appeared one morning just as summer was about to begin. The sun was high and warm, and its long beams of light caught the eddying dust in the work-room. Two beams crossed right in the middle of my carpet, accentuating the bright colors, and I imagined they were swords clashing in a mortal duel. One was the sword of the good hero; the other was of an evil villian. My hands, as they made knots, could give the hero’s sword a slight advantage, moving the other sword away for a brief second, but the implacable evil sword returned.
One of the boys, Karim, said he had been to the cinema twice, and that the movies told stories of good and evil. After great tribulation, the hero always triumphed. Then he put on a beautiful suit of colored silk and asked for the hand of his favorite maiden. The father couldn’t refuse. No, he was happy, because the hero had risked his life. Good had defeated evil. Karim, who was almost seventeen and whose fingers had grown too thick and awkward to make the thin, delicate knots of the carpets, had become a sort of overseer to us children. It was probably true that he had been to the movies even if such luck seemed incredible to us because some evenings when he was in a good mood, Karim told us the movie stories with all their details, and he couldn’t have invented them. He didn’t have enough imagination. They were long, complicated films. It took him two months to tell us the story of the first one. When we reached the end, we couldn’t remember the beginning and we asked him to start all over. I thought I’d like to go to the cinema someday. My father and mother had never been, nor my br
others and sisters. They were too poor. The cinema was a luxury for city folks. Like television.
The master and the mistress had a television. Sometimes at night, when we were trying to fall asleep, we could hear those strange voices in Hussain Khan’s living room and see the colored lights through the rush matting at the window. Karim, always Karim, bragged that once he had sneaked up to one of the windows, and had seen almost five minutes of a cricket game.
“What’s cricket?” I asked.
“Shut up, stupid!” he answered.
If you want my opinion, though, it was a big lie. It’s true that Karim did everything the master wanted and that he supervised us, because otherwise he would have had nowhere to go and nothing to eat, but he would never have had the courage to peek into the master’s windows. It was big trouble for anyone to go near the house.
Suddenly I realized that I had to get back to work. My mind had wandered. Just in time I managed to recapture a thread I was about to lose. Then the sunbeams were blocked and the two swords of light stopped fighting. We all turned around to see the master standing in the doorway. His big body filled it. He was dressed for traveling, with a long coat that almost reached his feet and boots covered with red dust. In his left hand he held a sack, and his right hand held the arm of a boy in an iron grip. The boy was thin and dark and not very tall; he looked about two years older than me.
My first impression was that he was handsome. Then I thought, No, he isn’t really good-looking. But he had such eyes. They were sweet and deep and they weren’t afraid. He was standing at the threshold of the workroom with Hussain Khan’s enormous hand gripping his arm and we were all looking at him. The fourteen of us child-slaves plus Karim, all observing another slave. He was one of the many who had come and gone over the years, but we felt that somehow, this new boy was different. He looked around at us, one by one. He was sad, of course, like anyone who has been away from home for a long time, like anyone who is little more than a slave, like anyone who can’t imagine what will become of him.