Kabuliwallah

On my way back from school, as I turned the corner of our dusty street, I came face to face with a familiar grin. Each wrinkle marking each eternal day of his life, Kashmiri’s long bearded face had broken into a toothy grin. ‘Of course, it’s Ramzan!’ I suddenly remembered. ‘Time he came for his annual trip.’ Aslam, simply called ‘Kashmiri’ by me and my siblings for as long as my memory goes back, seemed to live in a timeless time. He could have been 20, for his youthful laughter and twinkling eyes, or he could have been 80, for the tired lines that made horizontal patterns on his face, like fence wires. Sometimes I wondered if those lines were a map that he consulted everyday in the mirror, as he groped his way around misfortunes.
Every year, Aslam Kashmiri visits Delhi in the holy month of Ramzan, in the hope of earning a few hundred rupees by running errands for the families who knew him here, cleaning the masjid and some charity that people raised for him. After Eid, he would return to his family in the Dark Valley. He never called it so, but maybe he did. I do not remember why it stuck in memory as a ‘Dark Valley’. Maybe it was because of what I once overheard my parents say about him. Kashmiri had an old mother, a wife and two daughters at home, the elder of whom was roughly my age. His first born son was killed by a troop while playing in the street one day. No explanations were given, none were asked for. Just a few memories and some tears from a father who buried his own beloved son. And then, there was life. Back on track. ‘The Mare will come to my doorstep soon, Bibi’, he said one day. Kashmiri told me about the Mare of good Fortune that clip-clopped in the valley when good tidings were about to reach someone’s home. ‘What does it look like? Does it talk?’ I asked him. ‘No! One must not try to see it! That is important. If you hear the hooves of the Mare, you will be blessed with joys. But you must never try to see it.’ ‘Fine’, I thought. ‘As long as it’s bringing you some golden gifts.’
And sure enough, the following year, he brought us a present of a bagful of small walnuts that he grew on his small patch of land in the valley. ‘I have a little baby daughter, Bibiji!’ His eyes were dancing with joy when he handed the bag to my mother. ‘Did the Mare bring her? She must look like a fairy then!’ I piped up. ‘She does’, he replied. He took out a walnut from his pocket, broke the rock-hard shell with his teeth and fed me the kernels. ‘Kashmiri, how are your teeth so strong?’ I asked him, awed by the fact. ‘Bibiji, I rub my teeth with the raakh of these very shells. Haven’t you seen how Shaffo beats the metals with his iron hammer, and they obey his will?’ Shaffo the ironsmith made tools and pots of metal in his dingy little shop, the walls of which were always covered with soot. The analogy was lost on me, though, and I wondered how Kashmiri would look if he had teeth of that metal. Two years later, Kashmiri returned in December during Ramzan, with the news that his youngest daughter, (‘Fatima, we had named her’ he said) got hit with an iron pole when riots had suddenly broken out in the market where he had taken her to buy groceries. Fatima did not survive the blow, but Kashmiri did. ‘Did he try to glimpse the Mare?’ I wondered, but did not dare to ask because I could sense the grave air around him.
He returns every year, with his ‘salaam’ and wide grin intact, exactly the same as the year before. As he finishes his evening meal after breaking the fast, prayers constantly pour from his lips unabated. Our verandah echoes his words ‘May Allah reward you with the fruits and delicacies of paradise, for every meal that you feed me here.’ He rolls up the mat and leaves for the masjid where he sleeps at night.
The only other memory I have of being blessed with such fervent words, is that of a beggar who once arrived at our doorstep one freezing January night. He was hungry and cold, he said. I grumbled but got out of my warm quilt and took a little gravy and a piece of meat on a chapati for him. Never before had I seen a man eat so hungrily. After eating he thanked and blessed me with a heart wrenching voice that brought tears to my eyes. I could hear the Mare’s clip-clopping hooves.