Shaukat and Ali

by Madhuri Y

Shaukat and Ali, brothers of a sort at work. The ladies who throng to the store in Teen Darwaza would care more if they knew their story. They would raise their eyebrows, pause their purchases and say, “Never heard a thing like that happen!”

Shaukat is Shaukat – the one to the left. But Ali hadn’t always been Ali. He had been Avinash until his final year in mechanical. In class, he sat behind Sana, who was the most beautiful of the Khan household. Her father, who was a stickler for killing pride and remaining humble, even he acknowledged that.

Allah ka Shukr, Khan saab had a small garment business, which kept the chulha going. He set his hopes on his children. They would do better than him. He had brought his family and his father’s family out of the poverty that marked its presence in hungry eyes and ribs that stuck out. He had been the first to move to the city and then he brought them out one after the other.

In college, there were just ten girls in a class of eighty, and Sana kept to herself. Why she chose mechanical engineering, no one knew. It wasn’t the luck of the draw as many thought. In her mind was a factory with bolts of fabric in peach, turquoise, and fuchsia streaming out of the machines. 

She couldn’t go to a textile engineering college. So, she decided mechanical would suit her well. There she met Avinash.

The day it really began was the day riots erupted in the city. 

Violence had broken out like a thunder shower. Only this was a roaring hot furnace with the slice of a blade and a bonfire. Their bus was stopped, and the students asked to get off.

One of the other girls gave Sana her bandhni dupatta. Another supplied a bindi, and the men wielding knives and lathis didn’t give her a second look.

She walked bravely past them. All that was fine, but she couldn’t go home. Avinash offered his place. After a moment’s hesitation, she accepted. 

After that day, they started chatting.

Khan saab was aware of it because he kept a silent eye on her. If he noticed the affection, he didn’t comment. When he dropped Sana off at college, he refused to look Avinash in the eye until the day Avinash came to seek his blessings and his daughter’s hand in marriage.

Khan saab asked him only one question. “Will you become one of us?”

“Am I already not?” Avinash might have said if he was older. He was just twenty-two, and he said, “Ali sounds like a good name.”

Khan saab smiled a rare smile through the pain in his belly. Unknown to the family, a tumour was growing, and he was a worried man. Too busy bringing his family out of the village and poverty, he had left marriage a little too late. Shaukat was just eight.

Sana was a gem, but if she married within, her in-laws would keep her at home. He was loath to send her to such a house. 

Marriages are a matter of providence. Things unknown to the couple are set in motion at different points in time. These travel along nameless roads until one day, they all congregate at the centre. 

Khan saab’s unwillingness to accept poverty as his fate, working nightmarish days and hours in a zardozi unit as a child, setting up his shop, and finally Sana dreaming of setting up a factory brought her to college.

Avinash’s fever (just a week before the entrance exam) lowered his score enough to bring him to the same college. The rioters did their bit. The final stroke was drawn by Khan saab’s tumour, which made Sana’s wedding quite urgent.

He died within six months of his daughter’s marriage. Two years later, the textile factory rose outside Ahmedabad. It thrived for two decades before the riots came roaring in again and burnt the factory down. 

If there was one thing Ali had in abundance, it was patience, the quality Khan saab had seen in his future son-in-law. He took back Khan saab’s shop, which he had only rented out, and restarted the business in Teen Darwaza.

He knows the factory will rise again.

This story was written during Rashmi Bansal’s Short Story Writing workshop, inspired by the visual prompt.