No one could remember when Master Yaqub had begun to lease the small room in their neighbourhood (mohalla). However, everyone seemed to know that Master Yaqub was an immigrant and that he came from some part of southern Punjab; the dialect he used was spoken around Multan. Master Yaqub lived in the leased room, and the boys from the neighbourhood came to him for help with their math, multiplication tables and to practise their writing on wooden slates.
Master Yaqub owned to quails and one rooster. The quails remained locked up in the cages, but the rooster stayed just outside the door of his room. Master Yaqub had put a copper ring on one of his legs and tied a strong string to it; the other end of the string was tied to a nail he had hammered into his door frame. Master Yaqub was respected and appreciated by everyone in Ameer Mohalla and they never failed to greet him when they passed by his door. They were sure Master worked, but no one knew exactly what he did. Perhaps he was a bookkeeper for some tradesmen in the vegetable market in another neighbourhood, or he laboured for daily wages in some factory or the other; whatever it was he did, they knew he scarcely managed to get by on what he earned.
As it happened, Master Yaqub was a humble and modest person, who didn’t know how to look out for himself in a metropolis like the Greater Lahore; Lahore, the capital city of the largest province shared between India and Pakistan. His plain looks inspired little love or compassion, and his manner of speaking little poise. Since he did not lie, cheat or exaggerate, nor did he try to bully others or boast, no one believed what he said, and his speech was so full of grammatical and linguistic errors that his listeners would desert his company in frustration. So naive, so simple was he that he did not appear to belong to the human species. And because no one likes to associate with such people, he did not have any friends. His presence eventually had become a burden to the neighbourhood and to its societal structure. Ironically, that is precisely why the people of the neighbourhood respected him; bowed and said their “salaam”, before moving on when passing by his door.
One winter evening, Master Yaqub’s landlord castigated him loudly. Using harsh language, he threatened to throw out all his belongings if he didn’t pay the rent he owed him for the past six months within three days. Master Yaqub froze with fear; he didn’t have the obliged one hundred and eighty rupees. He had only forty rupees. He attached to it a ten-rupee note from his wallet to add it up to fifty. Up until now, the landlord had accepted the twenty, thirty, or forty rupees that Master Yaqub handed over each month and had extended the rent deadline. This time, however, he appeared to be adamant about getting his money. Flinging the fifty-rupee wad, tied with thread, in front of the rooster, he shouted: “Bugger off! I will not accept this. Give me the full amount; the one hundred and eighty rupees you owe.” Master Yaqub picked up the wad of notes from the floor and put it in his pocket. Since he was unaccustomed to showing his emotions, he was not able to weep. He went to his bad and sat down on it downheartedly.
At the end of three days, the landlord removed Master Yaqub’s belongings from his room; he placed Master’s bead behind the two transformer poles near the sidewalk and the rest of his possessions around it. He clamped a new lock on the door and, climbing onto his scooter, rode away. The landlord’s house was at some distance from this neighbourhood, but he visited it each month in order to collect the rent due to him from the rooms he had let out.
Master Yaqub managed somehow to pass the night under the transformer. The next day he went to the mansion of Sheikh Karim Nawaz, whose three kids Master Yaqub had tutored, to request a loan of two hundred rupees. Knowing him for the simple and meek fellow he was, Karim Nawaz brushed him off; lending money to the likes of him was not a good idea. Then Master Yaqub went to Ismael the merchant and, reducing his request to one hundred and fifty rupees, asked him for a loan. The merchant, too, turned him down. Master Yaqub approached everyone: the barber, butcher, doctor, lawyer, baker, but was let down by each in turn. They all told him the same story; faced with inflation, they did not have anything spare to lend him.
Master Yaqub spent eight nights in the open, underneath the rickety and fragile shelter of the transformer, before going to the homeopathic doctor to have his pulse taken. The doctor examined him with his stethoscope and announced: “Master, you have pneumonia. I will give you some medicine, but you should consult another doctor as well.”
Saying “Very well”, Master Yaqub left him and went to Jabbar’s bakery to buy hot milk. He drank the milk and, showing his racing pulse to Jabbar, begged the baker to loan him two hundred rupees. Jabbar began to laugh: nobody in his right mind would lend such a fool a rupee and here he was asking for two hundred! The thought was so ludicrous that even Jabbar, who rarely laughed, could not contain himself.
With a quilt wrapped around his head like an igloo, Master Yaqub sat on his bed for three consecutive days. Those who passed by greeted him and remarked: “Getting some sun, Master?” and from inside his quilt, in a muffled voice, Master would reply, “Yes, I am feeling a bit cold.”
On the fourth day, at dawn, around time of prayers, Master Yaqub died. Every inhabitant of Ameer Mohalla was deeply grieved by his death. After breakfast, they gathered outside and, wrapped in silence and sadness, stood in the sun. Master’s quail were given a bowl of birdseed and his rooster was fed flour and sugar balls. Sheikh Karim Nawaz came out of his mansion to sit under the transformer. A big rug was spread on the ground and somebody placed a few newspapers on it. People sat around the rug.
Sheikh Karim Nawaz took out two hundred – rupee notes and, giving them to Saeed and Bilal, sent them off on their scooters to arrange for the grave. He gave three hundred rupees to Jalal to go with Rehmat to arrange for the white burial garment, incense, rose water and flowers. Jabbar the baker prepared a big pot of tea and served it to the gathering of mourners. People started collecting money for the final Quran reading ceremony and before long the residents of Ameer Mohalla had collected eight hundred and eleven rupees to hand over to Sheikh Karim Nawaz.
