24
“Take off your shoes.”
I looked behind me. He stood silently silhouetted in the doorway.
I feel like I don’t know anything about Asad. I don’t know his age or when his birthday is. I don’t know where he goes to school. I don’t even know what his hobbies are. But for a few hours each day, I feel like we have been friends for years. We play cricket together at dusk in the dusty street outside our house, surrounded by the rolling mountains of Abbottabad. Not much is said – his Hindku is far superior to mine – but we play until the mosquitoes become too vicious to bear. When he does speak, it’s clever and spiked with a wicked wit.
We go inside where a rusty bike lies butchered on its side, one wheel separated beside a tangled chain. He disappears into the kitchen and returns with a bowl of cooking oil, a knife and a piece of string. He sets about mending the bike, forging parts where there were none before. This is his element.
I sit and watch, trying to outsmart him with a more inventive idea to attach the wheel to the bike. But he is far ahead of me, already hammering the axles into shape with the butt of the knife. I go to the kitchen to get us both a glass of coke. He doesn’t touch his.
The time approaches 11pm and the crickets chirp a cacophony of sound among the bushes outside our house. The bike is fixed in the Pakistani sense of the word, held together with string, bent metal and hope (mostly hope). I ask him if he will ride the bike into school. He shrugs in reply. I’m thinking that he won’t go to school tomorrow; history, mathematics, geography. These things mean little to him. He likes the affirmation of creating something out of nothing, of fixing something that was previously broken. At least I think he does.
“Take off your shoes.”
He’s still there, silhouetted in the doorway of a friends’ house. He obediently takes off his shoes. I am allowed to enter with the honour of retaining my sandals. To them he is just our servant, our kaam wala’s son. I look at him but he is staring at his bare, calloused feet contrasted like the moon to the night sky against the bright marble floor.
We return home and play Frisbee in the dying light as the sun evaporates on the hills. His hand-eye coordination is terrible. He drops it often, and I have to dive to catch his wayward throws. I’m thinking that he only plays because I want to. I see his new project leaning against the fence – a vintage lawnmower with rusty razorblades. I finish the game and he immediately fetches the screwdriver. His hands, so clumsy minutes ago, now twist and alter with precision and grace. I’m still two steps behind.
I realise now, for what it’s worth, that despite all our arrogance against them, the meek shall inherit the earth.
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