By Umair Khan
“O Chacha[1], a bit faster! Look at all the space on the left. From the side, Chacha, go from the side!”
“Jee, sir, jee, sir,” said Chacha, as he squints in vain for the space being pointed out.
“Bhai[2], don’t just say ‘yes, sir, yes, sir.’ I am late, yeah? Go around!” said his rider, periscoping his neck out the left side and getting his face smacked by asphalt heat, swirling dust, and diesel fumes.
“Jee, sir,” said Chacha, and tried to outflank the oil tanker while avoiding the humans sharing the road with the machines.
The impatient young man in the cheap grey suit (stained to a dark grey in the armpits) was getting agitated. His planned rise out of a lower-middle-class present into an upper-class future was being stymied by this dawdling rickshawala[3]. He had absolved himself of all blame from a long lunch with his girlfriend at Nadia Coffee Shop [God, that place was expensive: but you can’t take your girlfriend to Burns Road, can you?]. Also gone was the afterglow of people staring at them [So enviously! So worth it! But maybe her shalwar kameez was too tight, no?].
“Can’t believe I got the one rickshaw-wala who does not know the roads,” he muttered aloud.
“Sorry, sir,” said Chacha. “It’s clearing up, sir. I will get you there, no problem.”
Then, hearing his customer’s peevish silence, he added: “It’s just… it’s just that… I have had bad news, you see. It’s been a bad time for me, sir.”
“OK, OK, that’s fine, Chacha, just please hurry up. I am already half an hour late. I should have left early, but how was I to know I would get the oldest driver in Karachi.”
“Heh, heh, sir, no, I am not that old. It’s this month that has aged me, sir. My son, you see. No more than your age… and now he is gone—”
“OK, almost there! Stay on the left… just there by the motorcycles… drop me there.”
The young man jumped out of the rickshaw, handed Chacha five rupees less than the agreed-upon fare, and scampers off. Chacha pocketed the fare without counting. He stared blankly after the young man who melted into the post-lunch horde draining into the office buildings. No one approached him in the afternoon heat.
Chacha had burnished skin, prominent cheekbones sloping to sunken cheeks, luxuriant, silvery hair, a thick salt-and-pepper beard but no moustache, the strong, wiry frame that only decades of manual labor can produce, and remarkable stamina for a sixty-year-old. In another tale of another era, Chacha could have been Odysseus returning as a beggar to reclaim his kingdom and his wife, with the aid of his son. In this tale, Chacha was a rickshaw driver and a widower who had just lost his only son.
“O-ho! Did you hear me? O, Bhai?”
A middle-aged woman in a traditional Memoni[4] long frock was gesticulating at him. Beside her was a pretty but sour-looking girl.
“Sorry, yes, yes. Where do you want to go, Amma[5]?”
“Amma?! So now we are being called an old maid by an ancient man!” Her daughter stops scowling and grins.
“No, no—not at all. I meant… where do you want to go, begum sahib?”
The old lady glared at him. “Towards Clifton. And drive carefully. After the day I have had, I wouldn’t be surprised if I get killed in a rickshaw accident!”
“No, no, God forbid. Inshallah, we will go slowly and get there safely, begum sahib.” The evening rush ensured that progress is as slow as promised.
The two women started talking. Or rather, the mother talked and the daughter listened.
“You are never going to see him again. Understand? Never again. You are going to your uncle’s home, and you are staying there. And no college for now, either.”
“So? I can still see him if I want,” replied the girl.
“Your uncle will break your legs. And his legs too. Let’s see him take on a police inspector. Let Mr. Romeo try to see you at your uncle’s house, huh? At least he won’t be coming to my house in secret. At least, I won’t come home to find him hiding in my bathroom, huh? Let him go hide in your uncle’s bathroom.”
The young girl started to sob.
“Let it be, begum sahib. Young people make mistakes. Having a child is a blessing. I know now how much of a blessing—”
“Mistakes? Having your boyfriend in your home and having your mother come and find Mr. Romeo hiding in the toilet? Mistakes?! And Chacha, who asked you for your opinion, anyway?”
“I am sorry, begum sahib. I spoke out of turn. It’s just that, you see, my son, he is gone and I am not thinking straight.”
“Gone? He left you? See: that’s what this new generation does. Just ups and leaves.” She turned to her daughter: “I wouldn’t be surprised if you too run away with a boy.”
“I might,” said the girl, dabbing her face with her dupatta and looking up in defiance [Why did that idiot have to say “Jee” when Mama had called out his name? I had already made the excuse that the bathroom door was jammed. And then he squeaks “Jee” when she shouts his name! Talk about peeing in your pants!].
“Go run away! Like I care. Go away like his son did and see what becomes of you.”
“He didn’t go anywhere but to his Maker,” said Chacha. “One day he was fine and then suddenly—”
“Must be drugs. Young boys are all into drugs these days.”
“No, begum sahib,” began Chacha.
“Such wicked times we live in. So hard to bring up children—never listen to their parents,” continued the woman.
“But Visal was not like that. He was a gentle boy.”
“Who is Visal?”
“My son.”
“Oh, the one who took drugs? I wouldn’t be surprised if this girl also takes drugs. Who knows! They tell us nothing, do they?”
“Yes, begum sahib, but Visal was not like that,” Chacha tried one more time. “He was kind—”
“Wait! Wait! Get in the service lane—that bungalow just ahead—the brown gate!”
As the pair clambered out, the woman said, “OK, bhai, how much?”
“Oh…” said Chacha absently. “I think… let me see—”
“You aren’t making up some crazy fare, are you?” asked the woman, suspiciously.
“No, no, begum sahib,” said Chacha. He looked resignedly at the ground. “Give whatever you wish.”
The woman looked surprised, offered a very low fare, which he accepted.
Mother and daughter walked towards the brown gate. The girl turned towards Chacha, thinking of waving to him, saying Khuda Hafiz[6]. But just then the gate opened and the stern future flooded past the tender moment. She turned and entered her temporary jail. Out of habit, Chacha waited till the women were safely in. He thought of driving towards the supermarket nearby, but bereft of all initiative, he lingered on in the deserted residential street. His thoughts, distracted by the amorous misadventures of his riders, returned to his son, the days and nights in the hospital, his helplessness and confusion, and the finality of his loss.
Three teenage boys emerged from a large, whitewashed house down the lane and were surprised to see a solitary rickshaw parked nearby, its driver sitting stupefied in the heat. They hailed Chacha, who eventually noticed them and drove up.
“Taking a nap, old man?” said a tall, pockmarked youth of seventeen. “Would you like to rest a while longer in the warmth? Or can you take us?”
“Heh, heh, no, sahib, I was not sleeping. But you young men will have your jokes, sir.”
“Yes, okay, okay. We want to go to Funland. You know where that is, right?”
“Jee, sir.”
The three boys crammed into the rickshaw.
“Oof! Changing undershirts at least once a month should be the law,” said the tall boy, screwing up his nose and gesturing towards Chacha.
“Especially in the summer!” says his corpulent friend, his jelly-roll hip half hanging out of the rickshaw.
“Well, the sewer infesting your armpits should also be outlawed,” cut back the boy in the middle, a fair-minded schoolboy whose aversion to people mocking the less fortunate was just at that moment heightened by his misfortune in being squeezed between his two outsized companions.
“You sure Hina will be there?” the tall one asked, changing the conversation to a nobler theme. “I don’t think she will come.”
“I am telling you she will be there. And this time she will be with her friends: her parents are going to Gymkhana tonight.”
“So no Naila Aunty?” asked the tall boy.
“No Naila Aunty!” smiled back the chubby one.
The boy in the middle listened quietly to this animated back-and-forth across his nose [Lord, what fools these mortals be! Poor Hina barely knows we exist and here we sit plotting happily-ever-afters with her!]. Chacha looked at him in the rear-view mirror. His bemused face reminded Chacha of his son, and he slips into a reverie.
“O! O! O! Where are you going! You nearly got us killed!”
Chacha swerved back into his lane, just escaping an oncoming minibus that scrapes the side fender of the rickshaw.
“Are you blind, old man, or suicidal?”
“Sorry, sir, very sorry,” said Chacha, who was also shaken by the close call.
Strong curses and rich oaths hit the back of his neck. He uttered more apologies.
“You see, sir, when I saw you three,” he murmured, his mind and voice sinking into a reminiscence, “you reminded me of my son—especially the one in the middle… so I fell to remembering how I would drop my son to school in the mornings—and how he, my son, how he would also be sitting in the middle of—”
“What’s he muttering on about? What’s he talking about his son for?” asked the tall boy.
The chubby boy, rubbing the side where the speeding bus had nearly lopped off a portion of his buttock, drew circles with his forefinger near his temple.
“Chacha Mad Max!” he said, opening his eyes theatrically wide, and the three boys laugh.
Chacha joined in with a nervous titter though he knows the joke is on him. Who could blame them, he thought. They were young—and he was at fault. And yet, he was saddened that the middle boy has also laughed at him.
“After that ride of death, I am not sure we should pay you anything,” said the tall boy as they get out of the rickshaw.
“Please forgive me, beta[7]. But give me something.”
“Don’t be a moron—let’s give him his fare,” said his fair-minded friend, nodding his thanks to Chacha.
They settled with Chacha and walked off towards Funland. Screams and laughs burst out of the amusement park. The heat of the day had relented. A cooling breeze blew in from the Arabian Sea. Chacha sat and listened to the merry din of the crowds who had coursed through their work week and the city’s clogged arteries to come start their weekend there. As midnight approached, the revelers started to stream out of the funhouse. But no fare approached him, the more enterprising cabbies and rickshawallas snagged the customers as they exited. The place emptied out and still no one came to him. Chacha decided to call it a day and head back to another sleepless night at home.
Nearly an hour later, he entered the dirt lot near his home where he parked his rickshaw nightly. A stray dog with a thin snout, large docile eyes, and a splotchy, cream-coloured coat walked up to him.
“Ah, Baba! I have not seen you in days,” said Chacha.
The dog nuzzled the hand he offered. Chacha sat down on the ground with a mild groan and leant his back against his rickshaw. He petted the dog and gave him some scraps of roti left over from his lunch. The dog sat down next to him.
“Yes, you were not around last week so you don’t know. Last week… last week, Visal died. Your good friend, Visal. It was not his time to go but he is gone. Such a kind-hearted boy, you remember? So good to you, wasn’t he? He would save bones and chichras[8] from his plate to give to you. Whenever he saw you lapping at a puddle, he would call you over and give you clean water. Yes, he was a gentle boy. But God took him away. Now if you had a puppy, your own little puppy, and then God suddenly took him away from you: how would you feel? You would miss his scent, wouldn’t you?”
The dog looked at him and listened. Chacha was gratified and talked on…
______________________
[Sep 2026]
Author’s note: Through whom shall I tell my grief? Through Chekhov: through his story ‘Misery’, on which this story is built, and through his humanism cast upon the humans of my Karachi.
[1] Uncle
[2] Brother
[3] Auto rickshaw driver
[4] A Memoni frock is an ethnic outfit native to the Memon community of the Sindh/Kutch regions.
[5] Mother
[6] Goodbye. God be with you.
[7] Son
[8] Leftovers
Eight semesters of writing & literature at MIT eventually led to Umair Khan’s main book project: Zareen’s Pakistani Kitchen: (published by Sasquatch Books of Penguin Randomhouse). When not playing entrepreneur, you will find Umair at Zareen’s Restaurant where he is co-owner and CTO (Chief Tasting Officer). Umair teaches entrepreneurship to humanists and scientists at UC Berkeley.
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