Habib Mohana was born in 1969 in Daraban Kalan, a town in the district of Dera Imsail Khan, Pakistan. He is an assistant professor of English at Government Degree College No 3, D. I. Khan. He writes fiction in English, Urdu, and Saraiki (his mother tongue). He has four books under his belt, one in Urdu and three in Saraiki. His Saraiki novel forms part of the syllabus for the MA in Saraiki at Zikria University Multan. His short stories in English have appeared in literary journals in India and Canada. In 2010 and 2014, his Saraiki books won the Khawaja Ghulam Farid Award from the Pakistan Academy of Letters. His book of short stories in Urdu, titled Adhori Neend, won the Abaseen award from the Government of KPK. This is the opening chapter of his novell, The Village Café, for which he is seeking a publisher.
The Village Café
I
The year was 1942. In Daraban—a flourishing village on the drab and dusty Damaan plains—there lived an eight-year-old boy named Molu. His father had perished in a smallpox epidemic, and his elder brother Dadu worked in Musa Zai, in the house of a feudal lord. Dadu’s employer paid him in wheat. He gave him four gunnysacks per annum. This was enough for them and their one-horned nanny goat, but wheat alone could not keep the family afloat.
Dadu visited his family every other Friday, and brought gifts of the fruit that grew in his boss’s orchard.
For a few weeks Molu grazed his neighbours’ cows to eke out a decent living, but the work proved too hard for him and soon his mother made him stop.
One day, Molu’s mother—whose name was Bakhtawir—said to her neighbour, ‘We are living in desperate circumstances. Find Molu some work. He needs some money. We do, too. His father’s death has left us penniless.’
The next day, the neighbour took Molu by the hand and set off for bazar. Molu’s brindled dog tagged along with them. He yelled at it to go away, and it turned homewards. But after a while it came back, determined to follow its owner. Young Molu, with his wheat-coloured skin and pencil-thin body, was thrilled; he had only been to the bazaar a few times before. His callused feet were shoeless, and his faded indigo shirt did not go with his patched pyjamas. The lower part of the front panel of his oversize shirt had virtually turned into a tube for want of ironing.
The early summer sun shone brightly in the pale sky.
Their short journey ended at a café that sold tea and homemade doughnuts. The neighbour was an acquaintance of Ramzi, the café man. He introduced the boy, ‘This is Molu, an orphan. He has a mother and a little sister to support. I have known them forever. They’ve fallen on hard times. Can you take him on as an all-purpose boy? Pay him whatever you consider reasonable.’
‘What did he do before coming here?’
‘He grazed cows.’
‘You’ve brought me a jungly guy… Okay. I’ll take him on. I’ll give him three rupees a month. I’ll also give him tea, lunch, and one penny per day as pocket money.’
‘Alright. Can he start work today?’
‘Yes. Why not?’
The café man brought them tea in glazed teacups positioned in saucers. The neighbour started drinking, but it was too hot for Molu. To cool the liquid, he poured it into the saucer and blew on it. He slurped it, still standing. His belly stuck out, his nose was running, and his breath was whistling, but he savoured every sip. It was worlds away from the hot brown liquid he had at home. For the first time in his life he was drinking tea made with sugar and not with gur. The café’s teacups were stylish too. They had fine-looking flowers painted on them, unlike the crude clay cups he used at home, which were made by the village potters. In those unglazed cups his mother’s cloudy tea took the hue of floodwater.
His neighbour gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder.
‘Molu, I’m going,’ he said. ‘Ramzi is an old friend of mine. He’ll treat you like his son. Work hard, and never give him a chance to complain.’
Molu glanced up at his neighbour, feeling as if he’d been sold off to the café man. The neighbour said his goodbyes and left. Molu’s gaze lingered on him until he was swallowed by the crowd of pedestrians. He wanted to run and lock his arms around his neighbours’ legs, but he stayed where he was.
The café was a long mud room with low ceilings. The inside walls were spattered with streaks of sputum and naswar—moist powdered tobacco snuff that was stuffed under the lower lip or inside the cheek. The café’s double-leaf door was slightly higher than Molu. To enter, you had to bend low. Half a dozen twine cots lined the walls, and between them stood a long low mud platform, which acted as a table for cups, caps, and turbans.
Rolling his sleeves up Molu approached the table, on which lay a batch of dirty teacups quilted in houseflies. When his shadow fell on the table, a dark cloud swirled into the air. He had never washed cups in his life, but luckily it didn’t require much skill.
He grabbed a teacup by the handle, plunged it into in the bucket of murky water, and whirled it around. When he fished it out, it was as clean and spotless as a peeled egg. He didn’t feel the need to scrub the cups. He had finished. Touching water was so relaxing. When the cups were clean, he flipped them over and arrayed them in lines on the moss-encrusted table. First he arranged them colour-wise, and then shape-wise. He upturned the saucers on the teacups, but shook his head and changed his mind. Finally, he stacked the saucers in piles of five. He made to give the cups yet another dunk, but Ramzi stopped him. ‘Give it a rest. You’ll rub the paint off them.’
Molu dried his hands on his shirt. He hated sitting idle, so he put some logs on the fire, causing the flames to rise and roar.
‘Take them off!’ Ramzi bellowed. ‘We don’t need a fire. We don’t have any customers.’
Molu planted himself on a string bed, his feet bicycling in the air. Then he remembered the stone marbles in his pocket. He had carved them when he went to the scrublands to graze cattle. He sat down in a corner of the café and played with them, all by himself.
Across the room, Ramzi reclined in his rustic straw-bottomed chair, plucking nose hair with a pair of tarnished tweezers. Tears were streaming down his cheek, and he was depositing the nasal hairs on his trousered knee, leaving it strangely furred.
Molu’s dog, which had been hanging around outside for a while, sneaked into the café. To dissociate himself from it, Molu turned away. When he hissed at his pet in muffled tones, it only nuzzled him and licked his feet. He pushed it with his toe but it rolled over onto its back, showing its bald belly and private parts.
Ramzi rose from his seat and strode over to the fireplace, edging an ember out of the fireplace with a stick as if he were playing ping-pong. Then, he strode back to his seat and dumped the ember into the tobacco-filled bowl of his hubble-bubble pipe. His eyes fell on the dog, and he yelled at it. This emboldened Molu. He hurled a clod of earth at the creature. It bolted but waited outside the café, wagging its tail in eager anticipation. When Ramzi went to relieve himself in the bushes behind the building, Molu slung his canine companion a juicy blob of old tea leaves. It lapped them up like ice cream.
Ramzi’s son brought lunch in a double-decker tiffin container. Ramzi skimmed the cream off the milk, put it on a plate, and covered it with coarse sugar. They sat down at the mud table and dug into the sweetened cream, paper-thin chapattis, roasted okra, onions rings, and chutney. For Molu it was the feast of his life.
Ramzi’s son was taking the lunch things home when he noticed a dog hanging around outside the café. The boy picked up a discarded date-frond twine from the street, lassoed the dog and pulled, but the creature wouldn’t go with him. It shot an anxious look at Molu. Not wanting to reveal that the dog belonged to him, Molu didn’t do anything to help. It yelped and wriggled to free itself, but to no avail. Molu watched helplessly as the other boy dragged the struggling dog homewards. It left a long trail in the brown yielding dust.
After a while, the tired creature made its way back to the café, trailing its makeshift leash. It was a sorry sight, waiting outside the café for its master to finish work.
Ramzi lounged in his chair while Molu worked like a robot. He washed cups, took tea to the customers, and brought money to his boss, which he dropped into the small wooden cashbox. Curious, Molu wondered what sort of things the grimy cashbox contained. Many a time he was tempted to sneak a peek, but managed to resist. At last, he had a stroke of luck. As he was handing money to Ramzi, he got a tantalizing glimpse at the contents of the cashbox. It held pigeonholes, tiny shelves, and a murky underground store. It was cluttered with coins of various colours and sizes, as well as paper money. It also held cowry shells, a pair of tweezers, a rosary crafted from date seeds, a phial of perfume, and a fine-toothed wooden comb.
Towards the end of the day, Molu’s shirt was smudged with tea stains. His feet were wet and muddy and his toes squelched. He was worn-out but glad. In a single day he had seen and experienced many new and enthralling things. And so much cash had passed through his scrawny little fingers.
Before he closed the shop, Ramzi opened the moneybox to count the day’s takings, which mostly consisted of coins. As he went through the cash-counting ritual, his piggy eyes sparkled. After counting it, he cascaded the jingly palmful of loose change into the side pocket of his kurta so it bulged like a nanny goat’s udder.
Molu went home and told his mother and grandmother about all the marvellous things he had witnessed at the café. They listened with rapt attention, as if he had arrived from another planet. They were living in the same village, so how come they were unaware of these astonishing things?
*
In the café, Ramzi kept all edible items under lock and key except for moist brown sugar, which he stored in a lidless bin. When he went to relieve himself, Molu would shovel sugar into his mouth and chew it quickly, gulping water to wash it down. In order to conceal his theft, he assumed an expression of innocence.
One sweltering noon, his boss had gone for a toilet break, and Molu decided to experiment. He scooped some sugar into a tumbler, added water, and stirred it nervously. His heart was going a mile a minute. The sugar wasn’t dissolving properly, and he was running short of time. He swallowed the saccharine mixture in three big gulps, wiped his mouth on his threadbare sleeve, and sat the tumbler on the mud table. To avert suspicion, he busied himself scrubbing a pot with crushed charcoal and a gourd sponge.
Ramzi returned, holding the tasselled ends of a knitted drawstring in his clenched teeth. Inside his loose trousers his left hand was busy catching a drop of urine on a clod of earth as was the custom. When he was satisfied that the dripping had stopped, he chucked the urine-soaked clod away, tied the string of his trousers, and picked up the tumbler Molu had just used. As he shuffled towards the earthenware vat to wash his hands, he realised that the tumbler was sticky. He peered into it, and there it was: a small, wet heap of sugar. He scooped it up with his forefinger and licked it tentatively. Then he tugged Molu’s raven hair harshly. ‘You stole my sugar? You drank it? Does sugar grow in the goddamn fields of Daraban?’
‘I didn’t steal it.’
‘Then how on earth did it get into this tumbler?’
Molu was promptly fired. After two days, his neighbour went to Ramzi, apologized on the boy’s behalf, and persuaded him to reconsider.
*
During spare moments Molu sat in front of the café and played with his stone marbles. Every now and again he was joined by Ramzi’s son, and they would play short games in the middle of the bazaar. Once, Molu screwed a hexagonal iron nut onto a little stick, and taught his friend how to shape marbles by striking a small piece of stone with this improvised hammer.
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Ai Wei (Author), Alice Xin Liu (Translator, Chinese to English ) , The Road Home, Penguin Random House/Penguin Books, 2019, 81 pages