Fazal Karim
Fazal Karim was born on March 8, 1934, in Gaggan in the Potohar plateau of northern Punjab, then under British rule in India. His household spoke Potohari Punjabi at home and used Urdu for dealings outside the village, and they practiced Sunni Islam in the ordinary village way: Friday prayers when work allowed, Ramadan fasting, alms when there was grain to spare, and home remedies that mixed Qur’anic recitation with a tied cloth amulet.
He entered a joint house with his father’s parents that ran on shared labor and shared authority. His father, Karim Bakhsh, farmed as a tenant and sharecropper under a local malik, and his paternal grandfather Haji Ghulam Rasul decided most matters: when to plant, when to borrow, who would speak in disputes. His mother, Amina Bibi, kept the hearth and the children, with help and supervision from his grandmother Sakina Bibi. Fazal was the second child. His older sister Zainab had been born in 1931 and died in 1933, before he arrived. Her small grave and the way adults lowered their voices when they said her name stayed inside family talk. Amina watched Fazal closely through his early fevers and coughs and did not let him sleep outdoors the way some boys did in the hot months.
By six he carried water in a small container, fetched fodder, and kept chickens from wandering into the cooking area. The household meant constant voices: men returning from the fields, women trading gossip while grinding grain, a baby crying, someone calling for salt. Fazal liked the hours after the evening meal when the older men sat near the hujra and talked. He asked questions that irritated his grandfather—about where a peddler came from, what a train looked like, why some villages had wells lined with brick and others did not. When an elder scolded him for interrupting, he stopped for a while, then leaned toward another speaker and started again.
His father tried mosque lessons for him in 1940, sending him with a slate and a bit of chalk. Attendance broke against work needs. Some mornings he went; many mornings he was needed to mind animals or help bring bundles. He learned to recognize a few Qur’anic phrases by sound and rhythm, and he could repeat short surahs, but he never learned to read or write. As he grew, he compensated by listening carefully and remembering what he heard. He could repeat a list of market prices from Rawalpindi bazaar without mixing up the numbers, and he remembered who owed whom a favor.
Partition reached him as a teenager. In 1947 and 1948 the roads near Rawalpindi filled with frightened families and carts piled with bedding, and the adults in his house stored grain more tightly and kept the boys close. Karim Bakhsh stood with other men at night with sticks and an old gun that rarely came out, and his uncle Rahim Khan walked the boundaries of their rented fields at dawn. Fazal learned what fear looked like without being told. He watched his mother give water to a passing family and then count their own flour again in the same hour. The village adjusted to new officials and new papers, and the talk shifted from British officers to Pakistani ones.
As soon as he had the strength, he worked as a full hand. By 1950 he bargained for day wages during harvests in neighboring villages and carried his earnings home in a cloth knot. He liked the tea stall near the road where laborers gathered. He teased his friend Bashir about his loud laugh and Bashir teased him back about his short height, and they both kept watch for a contractor looking for hands. Fazal avoided men who bragged too much; he preferred someone who could tell a clear story of where work was available. Sometimes in the cool season they sat outside and ate roasted gram with salt, sharing a single newspaper someone else read aloud.
Marriage came in 1955. His parents arranged it with a family they trusted, and Jamila Bibi entered the household as his wife. She learned quickly where things were kept, which elder to ask before slaughtering a chicken, and how to speak to Sakina Bibi without inviting a quarrel. Fazal and Jamila did not build a romantic life; they built a working one. He brought home wages and grain; she turned it into meals, kept accounts in her head, and pressed him to keep shoes in decent repair.
Their first son, Naveed, was born in 1956. That same year Haji Ghulam Rasul died, and Fazal’s father became head of the household. Another son, Salman, came in 1962. In 1964 Sakina Bibi died, leaving Amina the eldest woman in the house. Shabana followed in 1965. Fazal lifted each baby with care and then handed them back to Jamila, not trusting his own rough hands. He took pride in the sound of a full house after the memory of Zainab.
The 1965 war with India did not bring fighting to his doorstep, but it tightened life. Prices jumped and rumors ran faster than facts. He stood in ration lines and listened to men debate the radio announcements. He remained outwardly steady, pushing his energy into finding work and making sure the household had grain stored away. When he felt anger at the uncertainty, he took it out in brisk commands at home and then quieted after evening prayer.
In 1968 a fourth child, Farzana, was born but did not survive the week. Jamila held her and washed the small body, and Fazal buried her without ceremony in the village graveyard. That same year the rainfed crops failed hard. The landlord’s men pressed for their share anyway, and a dispute turned sharp. Karim Bakhsh argued; Rahim Khan, who had worked alongside Fazal for years and sometimes quarreled with him over wage-sharing, argued louder; the malik’s clerk wrote down arrears. The tenancy ended. Fazal entered his thirties hauling himself from one day’s wage to the next, walking farther to find work, sometimes leaving before dawn to reach a contractor’s meeting point. The shopkeeper Chaudhry Nazir gave credit—flour, tea, a little kerosene—then tightened terms. Jamila sold goats. They parted with their buffalo after a final family argument in 1970, when the debt had swollen and the animal’s milk no longer covered it. Fazal hated handing the rope to the buyer. He went home and ate without speaking.
His father died in 1979, after years of fieldwork had left him stiff and breathless. Fazal became the eldest man in the house. In the years that followed, the village saw more preaching groups pass through, and Maulana Khalid, the local imam, spoke sharply against amulets and shrine-going. Fazal listened, asked questions, and then changed his practice. In 1980 he began going to the mosque regularly for dawn prayer when his body allowed it. By 1983 he had stopped tying ta’wiz to children’s arms and stopped using Sakina Bibi’s old remedies, reciting only Qur’an at the bedside when someone fell ill. He kept his temper more often by forcing routine: washing, prayer, work, meal, prayer. Some neighbors called it becoming “namazi” with age; he treated it as discipline.
Amina Bibi died in 1988. The next winter Fazal’s own lungs began to limit him. In 1989 he developed a productive cough that lingered beyond the cold months and returned worse each year. He still went out to fields but chose lighter tasks—cutting fodder, watching for stray animals, helping set bundles rather than lifting them. Jamila pushed him to visit Dr. Asif in town. He resisted the cost, then went and accepted cough syrups and tablets he could not name. In 1990 Naveed died at thirty-four. He had been the household’s strongest earner, and his wages had paid for Fazal’s medicines. Fazal handled the funeral obligations without collapse, then returned to mosque attendance with a stricter face.
Through the 1990s he lived with narrowing options. He sat in the courtyard in late afternoon, shelling peas or sorting seed with grandchildren, telling them stories he had collected from other men: about train stations, about the way Rawalpindi looked when he first saw it, about the Partition years without giving details that frightened them. He enjoyed simple sweets when there were guests—jalebi, a piece of halwa—and he liked tea brewed strong with more milk than Jamila thought was reasonable. When his uncle Rahim Khan died in 1996, Fazal was the last man standing from his father’s generation.
Jamila died in 1999. After the burial he moved more fully into the care of Salman’s household, sleeping in a small room near the courtyard. Salman carried the main burden then, arranging clinic visits and paying for medicines. Salman died in 2001 at thirty-nine, leaving Fazal in the care of his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. His routines tightened again: prayer, short walks, sitting with the men for a while, then retreating when his breath shortened. Shabana, married into another household, visited frequently and argued with her sister-in-law when she needed money for his treatment. He accepted her help without ceremony.
In his last years chronic kidney disease joined his lung trouble, bringing swelling and fatigue. On May 9, 2009, he died in the household where he had spent almost his whole life, in the Rawalpindi district countryside. The men washed his body, wrapped it in a white kafan, prayed the janazah, and buried him in the village graveyard, laying him on his right side facing the qibla.