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When railway tracks were being laid in the Thal Desert, it is said that there were the usual dust storms at regular intervals, which caused sand dunes to form at several places right on the tracks. An old munshi from that period used to relate strange stories about the events that are supposed to have taken place when the tracks were being built. Once, he said, the tracks were laid right through Hazrat Pir’s shrine. The trustee of the shrine was conferred the title of Bahadur Khan because he was scared of the British government. But why would Hazrat Pir be scared of

the British? So, one night, a veritable army of djinns and spirits descended on the Thal and chewed up the steel tracks as though they were sugarcane stalks. When the British engineer arrived on the scene the following morning, he found chewed-up husks of tracks scattered all around. Seven cauldrons of sweetened rice were distributed among the poor and the destitute to propitiate Hazrat Pir and alterations were made in the route. That’s why there is a big detour before the train reaches the next station.
Munshiji used to say that the engineer was greatly upset by the dust storms in the Thal. He had written to his government back home complaining that he couldn’t make much progress in his work because after each dust storm the geography of the area changed, the dunes disappearing from one place and turning up at another.
Moved by his earnest appeal, the British government contacted the Government of India, which obtained an amulet from a well-known Pir of Delhi and hung it from an acacia tree. After that whenever there was a dust storm the sand dunes didn’t touch the railway tracks.
But it seems Hazrat Pir was a greater pir than the other. Because the next time a violent storm blew, one sand dune installed itself on the tracks in defiance of the amulet hanging from the tree. Another amulet was sent for from Delhi and when the new amulet was hung in place of the old one on the acacia tree, a sizzling sound was heard and the dune caught fire and in no time at all ash was flying in all directions. In short, as long as the work on the railway went on, the tussle between the two pirs continued. Hazrat Pir’s djinns and spirits are active even now. Only a couple of days ago, Alla Jawa and his water buffalo were run over by a train only because he dared to travel by train too frequently. The elders advised him not to overdo it lest Hazrat Pir got angry. But he didn’t heed their advice. And this is what happened: while he was trying to drag one of his buffaloes off the track, he found himself under the wheels of the engine and was reduced to pulp. People had to scrape his flesh from the tracks with shovels.
In fact, when the railways had extended from Khushab to Kundian the elders of the Thal had predicted that the morals of the people would decline. The inhabitants would prefer to take up jobs rather than till the fields. The village would become desolate and people have no regard for each other. All this came to pass. But something else happened too. About a hundred villagers were recruited as labourers to lay the railway tracks. Within a short time they earned enough money to get wells dug in their lands to pull down thatched huts and put up brick houses in their place, and to buy land. It was during this period that Misri’s father bought a piece of land. Earlier, he had to travel to far-off villages every day during the harvest season to work for the landlords in the field, shearing the crop and threshing and heaving the grain. Now he became a small landowner and was given some importance in the community.
Misri Khan was in his prime when his father died. He still remembered many anecdotes concerning the railway racks that his father had told him. For example, his father would say, “My son, the trains that you see lumbering along at a distance of a kos from the village would not be there if we had not laid the tracks. The British engineer would measure the land and give us instructions to begin the work. Then he would while away his time, whistling or smoking cigars. We did the actual work of laying the tracks on the entire stretch that you can see before you, and our sweat and sometimes our blood has dripped on it. That’s why the track is accursed. May God save us all, by the grace of Hazrat Pir, from his iron monster!”
Misri had been watching the trains since his childhood. When the train was still far away, he could hear the roar, as though some giant was grinding a gigantic millstone. Then the boys would scramble up to their rooftops to get a glimpse of it. As it rumbled along at a distance of one kos from them they would tell one another that the train came from the place where the earth ended. It was a common belief among the villager women that whoever traveled in the train would become a wanderer for life. And that the train was haunted by djinns and spirits who, at the distance of Hazrat Pir, had once chewed up the tracks as though they were sugarcane. Only those inhabitants of the Thal Desert dared to travel on the train who had got amulets from the trustee of Hazrat Pir’s shrine. Khan Beg, a man from his village, had once showed the temerity to ride the train without the amulet. As a consequence he had to move from one place to another for his entire life in search of livelihood. At last he had crossed the river Chenub to reach Cheneot where he worked as a labourer in a seth’s house. One day, while he was carrying bricks on his head he slipped on the staircase. The bricks fell on him and smashed his head. As the news of his death spread, the trustee of Hazrat Pir’s shirne got into a rage and declared, wretches! Sit on the train without my amulet, if you dare! Whoever defies Hazrat Pir will meet the same fate!”
Misri had watched the train from near and far. He had thrown stones at it and had put stones on the tracks and seen them reduced to powder as the train rolled over them. He had also seen strange faces at the windows of the train, men wearing turbans with upstanding crests, their tail ends hanging from behind the turbans, women wearing heavy gold earrings, and children who had thrown peanut shells and bits of chewed-up sugarcane at him by mistake, and he had eaten half of it and brought home the remaining half for his mother. His familiarity with the railway trains consisted simply of these experiences, nothing more. He didn’t know how to board a train, how to sit , how it looked from inside, and how it started up again, and why it threw up so much smoke. Once he had pleaded with his father to take him for a ride on the train like many other children who had come to no harm after their train rides. His father had explained to him that those children were not from Hazrat Pir’s area. Children from his area traveled in the train only after obtaining an amulet from the darbar shirif, or they slipped out of the windows and were then carried away by jackals.
Even when he grew up, Misri was not required to go out of the village. For him his own village was his world, and outside the village lived only ghosts, spirits and witches, demons and magicians. And big towns like Mianwali, and Khushab were inhabited by carnivorous savages who roasted alive simple villagers and devoured them.
Only once did Misri go out of his village—when his father had fallen sick and insisted being treated by a village doctor who lived in Chitta in Soon Sakesar area in the north. He had taken Misri along. The railway tracks had not reached there, so he had to walk with his father from morning till evening to get there. Khuda Baksh, the son of his father’s friend there, told him what the maulvi had said: that before the doomsday came, the Dajjal would appear and that it was indeed the same Dajjal who pulled the train running up and down the Thal.
Misri had been quite content to live in his world of sand and dust storms, of sparse crops of grams and houses of fading colour with their courtyards fringed by black-stemmed acacias with white, elongated thorns. In Chitta, he realized for the first time that the world outside the village was beautiful. Right on front of Chitta, a huge, gleaming lake spread for many miles at the foot of Sakesar. To the north of Chitta lay the undulating harvest fields, and a cool breeze blew over the tall, fragrant grass on the hills. At dawn, along with the call to prayer, one could hear the sound of curd being churned in houses nearby. People had ruddy faces and a kind of sparkle in their eyes. How wonderful would it be if his village were situated on one of the hills of Sakesar! After sowing crops he would come only occasionally to have a look at them and spend the rest of the time at the chaupal, chatting away and singing. His hair also would be anointed with oil just as Khuda Baksh’s and he also would have got the barber to give him shave every four, five days and gone to watch kabbadi matches, animal fairs and comedy shows put up by wandering troupes of dancers and actors. The multi-level houses plastered with the white mud cakes of Chitta looked so beautiful that they had stolen his heart. Much as he wished his father to live on for years, he thought that if he died he would sell their land at Thal and settle down at Soon Sakesar, never to look back at the desert where the sun kept blazing like an oven, the wind smote one’s face and there was no trace of greenery except for the acacias and the gram saplings.
For a few days after Misri returned to the village with his father he kept on thinking about it. Then his father died and he gradually fell in love with the sandy land where his father had battled storms and dunes. What, he told himself, if the mirages gleamed in the Thal during the day, the winds howled at night and dust rained continuously from the skies? So what if the mud cakes plastered on the village houses had burned in the sun to red embers, and the raging sand-laden wind had left pockmarks on the walls? After all, the graves of his forefathers going back three generation lay there in the village graveyard and it was there that, standing on hillocks, his grandfather, like his father, had looked for a speck of cloud in the sky, but found dust storms instead.
And did Soon Sakesar have anything comparable to the acacias in the courtyards that stood solid on their black trunks, rustling in the strong wind? How pretty the trees looked, laden with yellow flowers and spreading their fragrance all around! When people woke up in the morning they found their beds strewn with yellow flowers, and if anyone poured out water from the earthenware jar he found one or two yellow flowers floating in the tumbler. During those days, some girl or the other from the village used to be abducted. The elders said that the djinns lived in acacia fragrance and could be seen only by unmarried boys and girls. And whoever saw them fell in love; the boy abducted the girl and the couple ran away.
It was in the season when the acacias blossomed that Misri had run away towards the hills of Soon Sakesar with his abducted bride. The girl wished to travel by train but Misri knew that if he sat on the train, Hazrat Pir would get him caught. So, he went up to Khuda Baksh in Chitta and stayed hidden for six months in his mud house about two miles away from the village. He returned to his village only when the girl’s father promised Khuda Baksh that on Misri’s return to his village he would publicly announce that he had, in fact, go this daughter married off to Misri. He did just that and thus saved his honour that was at peril. And he had not told a lie to the villagers. The first thing that Misri did after reaching Chitta was to get the maulvi to solemnize his marriage to Nisho in the presence of two witnesses brought along by Khuda Baksh. And when they returned to their village, Nisho was carrying his child, and obviously it was legitimate one.
They named their son Shakoor Khan, but people called him Shakkar (sugar) Khan, because of his paternal lineage, ‘misri’ meaning candy. As for Misri and Nisho, they called him by his pet name ‘Sweety’.
When Sweety grew up a bit he went with his friends to have a look at the train from close. That day he had a coin, which he showed to all the children. One boy told him that if he put it on the track and the train rolled over it, the coin would turn into an elongated knife blade. It sounded strange to Sweety that a one-paisa coin would turn into a knife worth a quarter, and that too in an instant. So when the tracks began humming and the children knew that the train was negotiating the big turn near Hazrat Pir’s shrine, Sweety put his coin on the track. But as the train came nearer and the tracks began to ring and shake, the coin slipped off the track. Sweety had his eyes fixed on the coin and when he saw it tumble down, he said ‘Ah!’ and lunged forward to put it back on the track. Luckily, an older boy leaped just in time to restrain him and the train engine lumbered along noisily at a yard’s distance. The wheels of the train turned, making a sing song sound—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven….
If the older boy had not stopped him in time Sweety would have been turned to mincemeat. This fact was transmitted by the peasants working close by to the women going into alleys, getting exaggerated as it traveled from mouth to mouth. When it finally reached Nisho, she came to know that Sweety had been run over by the train and that the train had dragged along half of his corpse and the remaining half was lying at the spot.
Nisho ran towards the railway track, weeping and screaming. Seeing her in that condition, people from the fields and lanes gathered around her. Then Nisho and all the others saw the boys coming back in the distance, Sweety among them. He was riding a piece of wood like a wooden horse, galloping and kicking as he came along, laughing all the time. Nisho kept running at the same speed and when she reached him, picked him up in her arms. Now she was running back as though she had just saved him from being run over by the train, and if she slackened her grip on him tracks would draw him back.
The same day a couple of youths from the village decided to go to Mianwali to have a look at the animal market there. Misri also agreed to go with them as he hadn’t seen the town of Mianwali before. There was, in fact, no other reason for him to go there. Then when someone told him that they were going there by train and would return by it, he backed out. However, he was told that they would do so after obtaining amulets from Hazrat Pir’s shrine. Someone else reported that things had become dearer because of the war and as consequences the trustee of the shrine had hiked the price of the amulet. At this Misri said, “I don’t want to get on the demon that was going to gobble up my son this very day. A hundred people from this village had participated in laying the tracks. That is why Hazrat Pir is very angry with the people of the village. I don’t want to die a horrid death in the train. When my time comes, I want a peaceful death with the words of the kalma sharif on my lips.”
When Sweety was in his first grade in the village school, word got about that canal as wide as a river was going to be dug from the Indus, and that the Thal would, like Sargodha and Lyalllpur, soon become lush green with crops. Orchards would grow there, factories and cinema houses would be built. Roads would be laid on which English ladies would walk. And the most educated person of the Thal would be made the commissioner.