AS we strolled along the shopping arcade on Elphinston Street, now baptised Zebunnisa Street, in Saddar, Karachi, Abu Begana, my childhood friend from Chakiwara, said: “You know, Giddu, it is Mother’s Day today!”
I expressed my ignorance, and said: “Really!”
Abu said: “I feel like sending her a pack of chocolates and flowers.”
“Flowers are all right,” I said and added: “But I don’t think a pack of chocolates for her is a good choice.”
“Why?”
“Are you sure your mother isn’t diabetic?”
“I do not know. I have not met my mother,” he said.
Surprised, I asked: “What do you mean you have not met your mother?”
Abu Begana stopped walking. He looked at the heavens, and said: “I do not know who my mother is, or was.”
“Most of the people in the world do not know for sure who their father is or was.” I felt tricked, and exclaimed: “But, we all know the woman who gave birth to us!”
Abu Begana moved away, and said: “I know nothing about the woman who gave me birth and then vanished.”
“Vanished!”
Abu said: “Soon after my birth, I was abandoned at a garbage dump near Ramswami on Barness Street.”
His revelations were enigmatic. We have been friends for decades. Never before he had talked about his identity. He was a stout football player and had participated in representative matches for NJV High School, SM College, and Karachi University during the traumatic years of late 50s and early 60s. He was on the verge of playing for Pakistan when during a savage lathi-charge by the mounted law enforcement agencies of Field Marshal Ayub Khan on a students’ demonstration near Guru Mandir, the cops broke Abu’s left leg and damaged it permanently. He now walks with a limp.
Abu Begana startled me with his apparently unbelievable story. I wondered when he knows nothing about his mother then how on earth he would send a pack of chocolates and flowers to her, and at what address!
Abu spoke on his own, and said: “Let us go to Ramswami.”
“What for?” I asked.
He said: “Let me show you the garbage dump where I was abandoned, and was later on picked up by an ASI of Garden Police Station, who gave me his name.”
Surprised, I asked: “Are you trying to tell me Chacha Dost Ali was not your father.”
“He was more than a father to me,” Abu said: “He was my mental as well as spiritual mentor.”
Chacha Dost Ali was one of the very few fine persons one occasionally comes across in the treacherous world. He had unflinching moral courage to disobey his superior officers for either setting the criminals at liberty, or leaving alone the dons of the underworld. He was a nightmare for the hired killers, terrorists, gangsters, and arms and drugs. One day, Chacha Dost Ali was gunned down, according to the investigating senior police officers, by the notorious ‘hidden hand’. The case was closed.
“On the occasion of Baba’s death, his two brothers, who had always despised me, disclosed I was not Baba’s real son.” Abu almost broke down. He said: “An illegitimate infant, I was rescued by Baba from a garbage dump near Ramswami.”
During my 30-year absence from Karachi, Abu and I occasionally telephoned each other and later on exchanged emails, Abu had never discussed his rootless existence with me during these years.
Abu Begana bought a packet of chocolates and flowers from the vendors along Jehangir Park in Saddar. We hired an auto-rickshaw, and headed for Ramswami. It was one of the longest and painful journeys I have undertaken in my life. A very dear friend was on his way with me to present flowers and chocolates to his mother whom he had never seen.
A few meters from Jubilee Cinema we alighted from the auto-rickshaw and paid the fare. It was a stinking, noisy, and a crowded place close to a huge choked sewerage nulla (outlet). Close to the nulla was an enormous garbage dump. We walked up to the dump. On arriving closer to the dump, Abu gestured me not to accompany him any further. I held back my step.
Abu Begana limped into the garbage up to his waist and stayed there motionless for some time, as if he was praying. He then raised his arms and placed the packet of chocolates and flowers at the top of the dump and lowered his head.
