Lower Bazaar
Photo by Zeeshan Kahn
In Murree, a hill station town, most daily routines revolved around two main shopping areas: the Upper and Lower Bazaars. Girls from my school could only go to the Upper Bazaar, which was considered safer because of its open spaces, tourist shops, and restaurants. The Lower Bazaar was a narrow, steep alley, packed with shops between old colonial buildings as it wound down the hillside. Only the boys from my school were allowed to shop there.
The Lower Bazaar had tiny shops selling all sorts of fabric, and tailors who could make clothes just by looking at a picture from a Sears catalog. There were goldsmiths, tanners, leather workshops, and people selling string and jute.
I was good at tying knots in my macrame class and hoped to earn some money by selling small macrame owls to the girls in my dorm. For that, I needed supplies like jute, which I could only find halfway down the Lower Bazaar.
One Thursday afternoon, I stood at the entrance to the Lower Bazaar, my heart pounding as I tried to catch my breath. I knew I was breaking the rules by going somewhere girls weren’t allowed. What I remember most from that trip is the baby I saw there.
A beggar woman sat on a dirty red cloth at the entrance to the Lower Bazaar. She chanted quietly, her face partly hidden by a worn headscarf as she held out her hand for alms. Next to her, a baby with thick black hair lay naked on its stomach. I stood there, frozen, as a crowd of men gathered and unfamiliar voices filled the air. I had seen beggars before in Rawalpindi and ignored them, but this felt different. I felt exposed by my reaction, out of place.
The baby was a boy, his torso square and soft like a sack of flour. He wiggled to the rhythm of a Bollywood song playing in the tea shop nearby, then stopped to nudge a toy car with the stump of his arm, his only limb. He saw me staring and smiled, not knowing he was different or that his life was decided.
I couldn’t go any further and returned to the safety of the main road, his black kohl-rimmed eyes following me.
Later, on the school bus back to campus, one of the girls said she had seen worse in the big cities. “You get used to it,” she said. “They do that kind of thing on purpose, you know.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I heard there are mothers begging on the streets who are so desperate to survive that they maim their children just to feed themselves. They get more money that way, you know.”
I pressed my forehead to the window and watched the pine trees and snow-capped Himalayas blur past. The baby lingered in my mind, a haunting image of suffering and innocence entwined. I was desperate to shake the memory, and the helplessness stayed with me like a shadow.
My macrame owls were a big hit with the girls in my dorm, thanks to the boy from my class who bought the jute for me. Sometimes, I still think about the Lower Bazaar and that baby. I wonder what became of him. Did he leave the red cloth, or did he remain trapped in a life he never chose? He’ll never remember me, the girl who stared too long, but I’ll never forget those kohl-rimmed eyes and how they changed me.
