Bayazid is unusual because he has drive, which is a form of curiosity as much as anything. Even as a boy he very much wants something, though he doesn’t know what he wants. He knows he doesn’t want to spend his life making chapatis in a tea stall. His imagination is inflamed by movies, and, when through herculean labor he learns to read, by lurid novels. His magpie mind knows there is something desirable and brilliant and different in that round clear impenetrable sphere that lies at his feet, the one he pecks at—like a snow globe found in the streets of the Rawalpindi bazaar, alien like that, to him. The scenes in that globe are real, but he doesn’t know how to unclip his magpie feathers and enter that magic space, to become like the little boys inside that ball of fantasy, playing in the snow.
Because he’s an orphan, he could even be of some extravagant parentage—he might be the lost son of the Emperor of the World—or why not, maybe the long-lost son of the Emperor of Ice Cream. Working in the tea stall by the bus station, he meets all sorts of people, serves them, converses with them. People of stature, who would never otherwise frequent such a grubby establishment, are hurrying through between busses and stop for a bite. The boy is clever, he listens to them, hears about distant places, different classes of opportunity. And then, all sorts of people come to the bazaar for commerce, the high and the low. His luck holds. The magpie Bayazid meets boys from a higher station who attend the nearby private school and live in a world almost as alien as a snowscape in a snow globe. He sees them every day, when they come for a cup of tea or a bowl of dal after school. That’s his opportunity—and he’s a clever fellow, he doesn’t let it pass him by. He slips into their world.
Bayazid forms a close friendship with one of the boys, Zain. His family is welcoming and cosmopolitan. How unusual is this in their social milieu in the nineteen-sixties?
The gulf between the tea stall and the middle-class home of his friend Zain is not that great. Zain’s grandfather would have been a small shopkeeper, a village man, who somehow discovered that in ’Pindi, where the British had a cantonment, he could make a nice profit selling them the goodies they craved, expensive things—Dundee marmalade and tinned Devon cream, Gentleman’s Relish and Earl Grey tea, sweet and savory luxuries that he ordered from provisioners in Delhi and Bombay. In India great fortunes were made battening on the foreigners; he made a small one, setting up his grocery selling luxuries to fancy customers.
Rubbing shoulders with foreigners and educated Indians and then Pakistanis, the shopkeeper would have developed an understanding of foreign mores. So long as he remembered his place, the memsahibs would indulge the delicatessen owner in a bit of small talk. The clever shopkeeper would study these alien creatures, to understand their tastes. Just as Bayazid rose to become tentatively welcome in the shopkeeper’s home, so the shopkeeper rose to a limited bantering acquaintance with his wealthy customers. The scent of social rising flavored the air in his shop.
And then in those late nineteen-sixties and early seventies the politician Zulfikar Ali Bhutto had found the magic words with which to beguile an unsophisticated electorate—equality, power to the people, distribution of wealth and nationalizations—and so all those ideas were eddying about. For a brief springtime in Pakistan, mobility upward seemed not just a possibility but a right.
Bayazid and Zain are supporters of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, who is campaigning in the election of 1970. They’re intoxicated by his socialist rhetoric and attend one of his rallies. Bhutto, of course, was a towering figure in Pakistan’s political history until his execution in 1979 following a military coup. Why did you want to make Bhutto a part of the story? Is Bayazid bound to be more cynical than Zain in thinking about whether Bhutto’s call for an equal society could ever come to anything?
Pakistan was a new-made entity in 1947, a project, a dream. The founders of the country thought that here they could draw a line in history, show humanity what humanity might do, when it rolled up its sleeves and began from scratch. At least there were idealists who dreamed such fancies, and their dreams were the pretext for creating this nation. The nineteen-fifties and sixties and even the early seventies were still a time of innocence and hope in Pakistan, echoed around the world in the florescence of the hippies and yippies and the dancing youth. The tap-tap of reality—of venality and power-grubbing—was even then chipping away the gold leaf and the curlicues, and yet this was the gold-hued atmosphere in which Bayazid formed his ambition to rise, to become more than a tea-stall boy. He was empowered by those politics, and in part this is the story of his disempowerment. His cynicism, though greater than that of more domesticated souls like Zain, was insufficient to the reality that followed.
