Free Children of Dust by Ali Eteraz

boys—brothers, by the look of them—coming out of one of the houses. They had rich brown skins, bellies unnaturally rotund from tapeworm infestation, and dark navels. In a line, as if choreographed, they squatted quite near us with a wide stance over the nali and relieved themselves. In their sleepy state they didn’t even bother to wave at the flies coming to sit at the corner of their eyes. Even from where we stood, we could see that the anuses of some, red and round, protruded a few inches out of their holes.
    “Why does it look like that?” I asked.
    “They’re experts at shitting,” Tariq said authoritatively.
    “Does mine do that?”
    “Want me to check?” he offered.
    “Mine does,” Muaz said with a grin.
    Before I could laugh, the naked boys finished their business and started up a loud chant directed at their mother inside the house:
    Ammi, pitthi
    tho thay tho thay
    paani la dey pitthi tho thay
    aaja Ammi pithi tho thay .
    Mother, ass
    wash it wash it
    bring the water, wash it wash it
    come on, Mother, wash it wash it .
    Getting no response, they repeated the chant many times. For a while the three of us chanted along with them. Then, having reached our destination, we climbed the steps to the madrassa and placed our slippers in wooden boxes on a shelf just inside.
    The madrassa was packed with boys and filled with the drone of Quranic recitation. All other sounds—the naked boys outside, the whirring fans, the running taps—were subsumed under the recitation.
    At the front of the hall there was a long wooden bench. Five qari s with beards, turbans, and sticks sat on one side, and an assembly line of students passed before them. Each student held a little sipara in his hand. When he got to the bench, he flattened it out and began rocking back and forth as he pronounced the words. Once a boy finished his lesson, the qari either dismissed him with a wave of his hand or, if the boy had flubbed the reading, hit him on the hand with the fat stick. The boys that were hit took the punishment stoically, for the most part, though when they’d gotten some distance away they let their faces contort in pain and they pressed their hands into their armpits and cried. There was a reason the boys took the punishment to the hands without wincing: those who broke down while being hit on their hands were pulled around the bench by their wrists, and as they twisted and turned they were beaten on their back and stomach.
    The students not currently involved in a lesson ran around the hall. They played hide-and-seek behind the columns, enjoyed a game of tag, or threw the mosque’s straw skullcaps at one another like Frisbees. An impromptu game of soccer—with two cloth topi s stuffed with straw skullcaps serving as the ball—broke out as I watched, with twenty or more students to each team.
    Tariq told me to take out my book and get in line with him and Muaz. “When you get to the qari , just tell him that you’re new and he’ll tell you what to do.”
    “Will he hit me?”
    “They always hit.”
    I looked at my hands and then toward the fat stick leaning against the wall. I started shaking. The hall suddenly felt deathly cold. With each step that took me closer to the qari s, little daggers of chilly fear jolted my body.
    Suddenly, I heard something like a crack of lightning and looked up at the dome, thinking that perhaps it had cracked. Loud wailing and screaming ensued.
    I soon realized that one of the qari s had become fed up with all the playing and was taking the stick to any child that he came upon. His preferred method was to grab a boy from behind by the hair or the collar and, in the act of yanking him, hit him on the back, the thighs, or the calves. If the qari caught a boy from the front, he almost always smashed the stick against the student’s shins. That was what had created the unearthly cracking noise. As the qari rampaged, going one from one boy to another, there was a mad, chaotic scramble. I