Iqbal Read online

  But I’m telling you this: He wasn’t afraid.

  Hussain Khan looked at us and growled, “What do you think you’re looking at? Get back to work.”

  We bent to our looms, but then we quickly peeked over our shoulders. Hussain brought the new boy over to an empty loom in the row next to mine, pulled out a rusty shackle, and locked it on the boy’s right ankle.

  “This will be your place, here’s where you’ll work,” he said. “And if you work well—”

  “I know,” the boy responded.

  Hussain took the usual slate, already covered with lines.

  “This is your debt,” he began, “and every evening I—”

  “I know,” said the new boy.

  “Alright, then,” said Hussain, “alright, Mister Know-it-all. Your old master told me that you’re stubborn and proud. He also told me, however, that nobody knows how to work like you, when you want to…. We’ll see. We’ll see.”

  Hussain headed toward the door. Once there he stopped and pointed his fat finger toward Karim.

  “And you, keep an eye on him!”

  Karim nodded uncertainly.

  The new boy sat at his loom and began to work. We watched him in silence, our mouths open. Nobody was as fast and skillful as he, nobody knew how to tighten the knots with such precision and delicacy. His fingers flew, even though the pattern Hussain had assigned him was one of the most difficult.

  One thing was for certain: He wasn’t chained because he was a numskull. Oh, no. It was for some other reason.

  “What’s your name?” asked Karim, trying to make his voice sound tough.

  “Iqbal,” he answered. “Iqbal Masih.”

  Three

  That same night, as soon as the master had turned out the lights and we felt sure that he was asleep, little Alì went to guard the door while a few of us crept along to meet the new boy. Karim came, too. Although he could never forget his responsibilities as overseer, his curiosity had gotten the best of him. Salman, a boy of ten who seemed older because he was so hard and tough, came too. The skin of his face and hands was pitted by three years’ work in a brick factory near Karachi. Maria also wanted to meet the new boy. She was a little girl, younger than me and tiny as a bird. She had arrived at the beginning of the winter, but nobody had yet heard her say a word. We didn’t know if she was a mute. We gave her her name. She had learned it immediately. She slept curled up like a small animal near her loom and she followed me everywhere like a shadow.

  Iqbal was awake. We could hear his chain rattle in the darkness. You could never sleep the first night in a new place. You felt lonely and you wanted to talk. All of us understood that. Most of us had had two or three masters, some even more. So we settled down near him. It was a moonless night and we could barely see.

  “Be careful, Alì,” we said. The master had gotten very angry when he’d last caught us awake at night. He said that it always made us stupid and slow the next day.

  Alì answered with a series of short whistles that meant “Coast clear.”

  We whispered some questions and waited to hear Iqbal’s story.

  Iqbal began, “My father used to go out early in the morning, when the first rays of sun appeared, and harness our buffalo to the light plow. At that hour, even in summer, the air was still fresh and pleasant. All around we could see the cultivated fields and the other peasants, starting the day in the same way. I’d go with him, carrying the bottle of water and the vegetables my mother had fixed for him. At first my father would work easily and his thin arms wouldn’t seem to feel the effort, but after a couple of hours he’d have to slow down. The earth was like stone. The sweat ran down his face and chest, and the red dust covered his hair. The plow didn’t dig like before, and even the buffalo lowed from the heat. Between midday and three the sun beat down mercilessly, and it was too hot to work. The boundaries of our world seemed to disappear in the haze. So we lay in the shade of a tree, eating and drinking water, while the buffalo twitched his tail nervously to keep the insects away. ‘This is a blessed land,’ my father would say, ‘it’s good and fertile, well irrigated. Look how everything grows. All you have to do is throw down a seed and by the grace of God a family could live forever in abundance. Remember that, Iqbal.’

  ‘Yes, Father,’ I would answer. But there was never abundance in our house. There was never enough food and my older brother was often ill. Once I asked my father why this was so. Why were all the wheat and oats and vegetables that we cultivated loaded onto carts the same day they were picked? Why in our hut was there only a sack of broken grain and another of dried chickpeas next to the fireplace? ‘Because all this belongs to the master,’ my father had replied.

  ‘And that’s right?’

  ‘He’s the master,’ said my father. ‘Who are we?’”

  “My father always said the same thing,” interrupted Salman, “but then he also said that the master was greedy and evil. In the privacy of our home he would curse the master terribly. My mother would shiver and beg him, ‘Stop, please! If he ever heard you …’ She was convinced that the master had a thousand eyes and ears. Women!” Salman concluded, “they don’t understand anything.”

  I would have liked to tell Salman what I thought. Maybe, in his opinion, we girls were stupid and useless. But I know I worked as hard as he did, some days even more. Still, I held my peace, because Salman was difficult. He was a rebel. He had been down in the Tomb once for two days, and when he emerged, parched from the heat and stung by the scorpions, he just spat in the dirt.

  To him, nothing was as bad as working at the brick-kiln. But he had always refused to tell us what brick-making was like. I couldn’t even begin to imagine it, but I prayed that the master would never sell me to the owner of a brick factory.

  “It’s wrong to curse our masters,” declared Karim. “What would we do without Hussain Khan? He’s the one who feeds us and protects us. He lets us work so that we can pay off our family’s debt.”

  “Yeah,” jeered Salman, “and he’s the one who will kick you out one of these days when you’re no longer any use to him. You’ll end up hungry and alone, wandering in the streets.”

  “That’s not so,” protested Karim. “The master knows that I’m loyal and he needs me.”

  “Right, to spy on us.”

  I thought they were going to start fighting right there in the dark. Salman was right: Karim was always ready to tell Hussain Khan everything that happened in the workshop. But then sometimes it seemed that Karim was on our side. I couldn’t understand it.

  “My father’s a good man,” continued Iqbal. “He’s never cursed anyone. He’s always accepted his destiny. Even when my brother got worse and coughed all night every night, my father didn’t curse anyone. He called the doctor from the village, and the doctor came with his bag and his glasses. He bent down over the bed and used an instrument to listen to the inside of my brother. First inside his chest, then inside his back, and he shook his head.”

  “I know,” said Karim. “I’ve seen it done, too.”

  “Then he talked to my father, took his hat and the bamboo cane, and left. My mother was crying. She had already lost other children. The next morning, while we were harnessing the buffalo to the plow, my father told me that the doctor would return with medicine that might save my brother. And the doctor did return, and there was another man with him, well dressed, a merchant or landowner, and he spoke to my father, too. At a certain point he pulled some money out of a belt he had round his waist and showed it to my father, who only said, ‘No.’”

  “And what happened to your brother?” I asked.

  “He didn’t get better. My father didn’t have anyone who could help him in the fields; I was too young and weak then. He talked to my mother for a long time. Then he rode the buffalo to the village. He came back when it was getting on toward evening and went out to hoe the fields without even changing his clothes, and when it got dark, he came in, breathing heavily. He didn’t even eat dinner, but
called me over and told me that a man would lend him a large sum of money, ‘Twenty-six dollars,’ he said. I tried to figure it out in rupees but couldn’t. With that money the family would be able to survive until the next harvest, and my brother would receive more medicine and God willing, get well. He said I would have to work to help the family pay off the debt, and we wouldn’t meet for many months, but I would learn how to make carpets and this might help me in life.”

  “My father had a debt, too,” I whispered in the dark, “after the embankment broke and he lost everything. A man came to talk to him, and then Hussain came and brought me here.”

  Iqbal continued, “My father said that he could send one of my sisters, but I said, ‘No, send me.’ He hugged me and asked if I was afraid. ‘No,’ I said, but I was lying. The carpet maker came the next morning. He came by car, and was very nice, even to my mother. ‘I’m taking you to the city,’ he said. ‘You’ll like it, just wait and see.’ I looked through the rear window of the car, and the last thing I saw while he took me away was my father whipping the poor buffalo, pushing it through the field. You should have heard the poor beast lowing.”

  “Oh, well,” said Karim, “it won’t take you long to pay off your father’s debt. I know—I’ve seen a lot. Nobody works as fast or as well as you do. You’ll erase those lines on the slate like the sun erases the snow on the mountains.”

  In the dark I saw Iqbal’s teeth flash briefly, as if he had smiled.

  “The debt is never erased,” he said softly. “It doesn’t matter how good you are.”

  “You’re crazy!” cried Salman. “You’re saying those things because you’re mean. You’re trying to frighten us. Every day the master erases a line, and once he’s finished, we’ll go home. It was like that with the bricks, too, believe me. We had to make a thousand bricks a day and we got one hundred rupees for every thousand. All my family worked there. Even my sister.”

  “And did you cancel your debt?” asked Iqbal.

  “No,” grunted Salman, “but what does that mean? Some days it was too rainy. Sometimes the clay was too sandy. Sometimes the bricks broke when they came out of the kiln, and then just bad luck….”

  “Have you ever seen anyone pay off their debt?” asked the new boy.

  In the dark I could feel Maria hugging herself close to me. Who knew if she could hear and understand what we were saying? I understood too well, and it annoyed me that that boy, the newcomer, dared to say such things. I wanted to scream, “You’re wrong! You liar!” but even though I barely knew him, he didn’t seem like that kind of person.

  “No,” we all said, one after the other, “no, we’ve never seen anyone pay off their debt.”

  Salman tried to get a word in. “And yet—”

  Alì, who was guarding the door, let out two shrill whistles. The alarm.

  We all crept quickly back to our beds. I tried to fall asleep but couldn’t. I kept turning this way and that. After a while I crawled back over the dusty dirt floor. The new boy, Iqbal, was still awake, too. I spoke in his ear, so the others wouldn’t hear me.

  “What do you mean,” I asked, “by saying we’ll never get away from here? We’ll never go home?”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “My name’s Fatima.”

  There was silence for a few seconds.

  “Can you keep a secret, Fatima?” he whispered.

  “Of course I can. What do you take me for?”

  “Then I can tell you,” he said, lowering his voice even more. “We’ll get away from here. You can bet on it.”

  “You said it was impossible to pay off the debt.”

  “It is, but that’s not how we’ll go.”

  “How, then? I’m beginning to think that the master was right to call you a know-it-all.”

  “We’ll run away, that’s what we’ll do.”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “I’m not. We’ll run away. You’ll come with me.”

  I didn’t know him. He could have been just a braggart, or maybe even truly crazy, but I still believed him. I went back to my bed and spent the night turning restlessly.

  FOUR

  For more than a month after Iqbal’s arrival nothing new happened. The heat got worse and worse, and we worked harder and harder. Hussain Khan moved nervously around the workshop, distributing threats and promises, oily caresses and slaps, all the while wringing his hands and invoking the name of Allah and the Prophet in vain.

  We old-timers knew only too well that he was expecting a visit from clients, probably foreigners. Our master was worried that the carpets we were making wouldn’t be beautiful or perfect enough to satisfy these illustrious customers. He tried endearments—my little ones, little doves, and even my beloved children. He reminded us that he had freed us from a life of hunger and hardship. He begged us not to ruin him—because his ruin would be ours. And then he threatened us with the most horrible punishments. And indeed, when clients were about to arrive, it was easy to end up in the Tomb for the slightest mistake.

  When we stopped working at sunset we were exhausted. Our fingers bled from all the cuts the threads made. Karim was the one who feared Hussain Khan’s anger the most. If he was kicked out, what could he do? With no home or family to go to, he’d end up alone in some corner of the suk.

  So during the day, if we dared raise our heads for a second, we were victim to Karim’s angry outbursts and his threats to tell on us. At night, however, he would take pity on our tears and our tortured hands. He would get up from his pallet and light a lamp, grumbling that we were all good-for-nothings, but then he’d give us some ointment for our wounds.

  Even if many of us were punished because Karim told on us, I have to say that he wasn’t so bad. We all knew his story: He had been sold to Hussain Khan when he was little more than seven, and since then Khan’s house had become his house, too. I think that Karim was a little fond of Hussain Khan, even though he, too, had slaved and suffered like the rest of us. Now that he was so big and therefore useless for working on the loom, he was afraid he’d be thrown away like an old, outgrown pair of shoes.

  We hated him when he got us punished, but we also understood that his destiny might be ours one day—though we didn’t think much about the future.

  The only one who remained untouched by Hussain’s storm of threats was Iqbal. He was rarely corrected, and Hussain didn’t try false, oily caresses, either. He usually just passed Iqbal’s loom, checking on the work without saying anything. Iqbal ignored Hussain. He didn’t let his attention wander from his work. He didn’t cry. He didn’t whine. He didn’t even make faces or gestures behind Hussain’s back.

  “See? Chaining’s tamed him,” sneered one of the boys.

  “No, no,” said another, “he wants to become the master’s pet.”

  I knew that these things weren’t true. But Iqbal paid no attention to the comments. Since we shared the same fate and the same kind of life, you’d think we children would feel united, but instead we quarreled and separated into little groups. The big ones always bullied the little ones—as though bullying could change our destiny or make us feel better.

  “Just ignore them,” Iqbal would say.

  One day, while we were trying to catch our breath during our lunch break in the courtyard, Karim started to put on mysterious airs like he was about to tell us some secret of the master’s.

  “We have to treat our new friend with respect,” he said, pointing to Iqbal. “He’s special. He’s precious. I heard Hussain Khan say so to another carpet maker.”

  We were all ears.

  “And what’s so special about him?”

  Karim waited until he was sure he had everybody’s concentrated attention. Then he looked around to make sure that Hussain or his wife couldn’t hear, shrugged his shoulders, spat in the dust, lowered his voice, and whispered, “The rug, the one he’s weaving, isn’t like all the others. No. It’s a Blue Bukhara. Ever heard of them? Only two are made each year, maybe three. H
ussain said so; I heard him with these very ears. A carpet like that is worth a lot of money, and not just anybody can make one. You need an artist for a carpet like that.”

  Here he stopped, and spat in the dust again.

  “Our friend here is an artist. Who would have ever thought it, eh?”

  All eyes turned to Iqbal.

  “Is that true?” we asked.

  Iqbal was as red as a chili pepper.

  “I don’t know,” he muttered.

  “Of course he knows,” Karim went on, “he’s already made one. Hussain said so. He said it.”

  “Is it true? Is it true?” we asked again.

  “I had three masters before Hussain Khan,” Iqbal answered, “and yes, for one of them I made a carpet like that.”

  “And how did you do it?”

  “I don’t know. I just copied the design they gave me.”

  We sat there in silence for a few minutes.

  “But … but if that’s the case,” said a boy who came from India, “then why did your other masters sell you?”

  “I don’t know,” Iqbal said in a low voice.

  You could see he was embarrassed and he wasn’t happy that Karim had revealed Hussain’s secret.

  “And you, Karim, you who know everything, do you know why his masters sold him, if he’s as good as you say?”

  “Of course I know, but I can’t tell you. The master trusts me and doesn’t like me to talk about his private matters.”

  We all snickered at that excuse, and Karim got mad. Once we had calmed down again, a dark-skinned boy from the south who had seen the sea stood up from the edge of the well where he had been sitting.

  “But then,” the boy said, “then the master will erase your lines. If that carpet is worth so much, he’ll cancel your debt.”

  We all nodded. We had never seen such luck.