In school during physics class our teacher had explained capacitors to us. Strange ideas came to me now. Words that Baba taught me from his textbooks: cell membranes, calcium-gates, egg-shaped mitochondria, and polarized ionic channels. Could they act as capacitors at times and hold charge so the flesh would stay alive even after I removed my fingertips?
The boy is gifted, someone said in my head.
I should have felt better. Instead I felt angry and miserable. I went to Ma’s room and opened the door.
She was sitting on her haunches in front of the only pretty piece of furniture in the room, a mahogany dresser Baba’s mother gave her as a wedding present. Ma had been fiddling with a half-open drawer, a jewelry box glittering in her hand. When I entered, she plunged the drawer into place. “Are you so ill-mannered now that you won’t knock?”
“Sorry, Ma. I wasn’t thinking.”
“Idiot boy,” she said quietly. Her gaze drifted back down to the box she held, fingers sliding up and down its metallic edges. The space beneath her eyes was dark and wet. “Next time mind your manners.”
I thought it prudent to remain silent. Ma lifted the lid and gazed within and her eyes turned inward. The effect was so intense that for a moment she looked dead, her lifeless eyes watching something in the box, or behind it. Uneasy, I took a step forward and glanced inside. A picture of a naked man nailed to a cross, surrounded by wailing people; then Ma was snapping the lid back into place so violently that I jerked and fell back.
Ma’s hands shook and she said something that didn’t make sense, “Never wanted to come here. Your father made me. I never wanted to leave my people,” and she glared at me hatefully. It was a brief moment, but nothing in my life since has made me feel so ashamed. So lonely and self-loathing; a mutant child broken and hated forever.
I turned and ran from the room, blinded by anger or tears or both, while my mother watched me from the darkness of her room, the jewelry box still in her callused hands.
~
Later they told us it was an accident, that a wooden shanty caught fire and set the muhallah ablaze, but we all knew better.
It was the tail end of monsoon season and the rains had petered out which worsened the conflagration. Fifty Christian houses burned down that night; the flames and smoke ceiling could be seen from as far as Gulshan Iqbal, we were told. Twenty people died; Sadiq’s father (who survived tuberculosis and, later, the 1999 Kargil War) was among them. Their corpses were pulled out from the wreckage, burnt and twisted. Sadiq’s mother recognized him only by the hare-shaped mole on his left foot.
When I went to see Sadiq, he sobbed on my shoulder.
“They took everything,” he wept. “My house, our belongings. My father,” he added as an afterthought. “They burnt the house down. My cousin saw them, I swear to God.”
“Which God?” I said. My right arm was around him. My left hand dug so hard into the flesh of my thigh I popped the blood blister a biocurrent discharge had raised on my finger. “Which God?”
He stared at me with bloodshot eyes, threw his head back, and cried some more; while his mother sat stone-like in the charpoy under the elm, rocking back and forth, her face blank. One hand tapped the bruises on her cheek. The other hid her lips.
I held Sadiq for as long as I could, then I went home, where Ma sat knitting a cotton sweater. Winter would come in two months, and we couldn’t afford to buy new clothes.
Baba was out—he’d been delayed at the clinic—so I sat at Ma’s feet and counted her toes. Ten.
She watched me through the emptiness between her needles and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Yes.”
“It was horrible, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Tell you what. Why don’t we take Sadiq and his mother some naans and beef korma tomorrow? I’m sure his mother is too upset to cook right now.”
I recalled Khala Apee’s vacuous stare, the hand covering her mouth, and nodded.
Ma placed her knitting needles aside, lowered herself to the floor, and hugged me.
“The world is a bad place,” she whispered. “We’re in danger all the time. People who are different like you, like us … can sometimes seem like a threat to others.”
I listened. Outside, thunder cracked. The skylight window rippled with water as the night opened.
“You use your gift to heal others, you hear me?” she said. “Don’t get involved with anger or hatred or sides. There are no sides. Only love and hate.”
Behind me the door banged open. My left eye twitched, the vision in it dimmed transiently, and cleared. Ma sprang to her feet.
“Zamir?” she said. “What is it?”
“Your husband,” someone said. I turned. It was the Edhi driver. His hair was dark from rain. His cotton shirt was soaked and I could see his abnormal navel protrude through it like a hernia.
“What about him?” Ma’s voice was full of fear. “What happened?”
Zamir had a look on his face I had never seen before. His lips trembled. “There was an incident at the clinic.”
Ma stared at him, eyes wide and unbelieving, then comprehension dawned in them and she screamed. It was a sudden noise, sharp and unfamiliar, and it wrenched the air out of me. I shrank back and clutched the end of Ma’s love couch, and the knitting needles slipped and fell to the floor, forming a steel cross.
“No, God, no,” Ma said. Her hair was in her eyes. She clawed it away, looked at the ends, screamed again. “Please don’t let it be true. I told him to be careful. I told him.”
Zamir’s face was ashen.
I scrabbled blindly on the dirty floor. The steel cross glinted at me. Pinching the skin of my thighs, I hauled myself up, feeling the world flicker and recede. Zamir was holding Ma’s hand and speaking gently. Your husband went to the Police, he was saying. He reported the Christian boy’s mutilated body. The mullahs didn’t like that. Then someone somewhere discovered an old marriage certificate with your maiden name on it.
Ma yanked her hand away from Zamir’s. “I killed him,” she whispered. Her fists flew to her chest and beat it once, then again and again. She rushed to the door, she shrieked at the rain, but the night was moonless.
Bewildered and crying, I thought about the tin box Sadiq hid in the canal when he realized they would be attacked. I thought about dead bodies and festering secrets; of limbs thrashing on a healer’s fingertips; of the young Christian boy who was tortured to death. I thought of how “Daoud” could have been “David” in a different world, such a strange idea, that. Most of all I thought about the way the chicken breast thrummed under the influence of my will, how it kept jerking long after I took my hands away. Would Baba whirl if I touched him, would he dance a final dance for me?
I wiped my tears. From the crevasse of the night rain blood-black gushed and pawed at my eyes. Then we went in Zamir’s rickshaw to pick up my father’s corpse.
~
Someone once told me dust has no religion.
Perhaps it was the maulvi sahib who taught me my first Arabic words; a balding kind, quiet man with a voice meant to chant godly secrets and a white beard that flowed like a river of Allah’s nur. The gravedigger who was now shoveling and turning the soil five feet away looked a bit like him, except when he panted. His string vest was drenched with sweat, even though the ground was soft and muddy from downpour.
Perhaps it was Ma. She stood next to me before this widening hole, leaning on Khala Apee as if she were an axed tree about to fall. Her lips moved silently all the time. Whether she prayed or talked to Baba’s ghost, I don’t know.
Or perhaps it was Baba who lay draped in white on the charpoy bier under the pipal tree. The best cotton shroud we could afford rippled when the graveyard wind gusted. It was still wet from his last bath. Before they log-rolled him onto his back, the men of our neighborhood had asked me if I wanted to
help wash him.
I said no. My eyes never brimmed.
Now I let a fistful of this forgiving dust exhaust itself between my fingers. It whispered through, a gentle earthskin shedding off me and upon Baba’s face. It would carry the scent of my flesh, let him inhale my presence. I leaned down and touched my father’s lips, so white, so cold, and a ghastly image came to me: Baba juddering on my fingertips as I reach inside his mouth, shock his tongue, and watch it jump and thrash like a bloodied carp.
Tell me who murdered you, I tell my father’s tongue. Talk to me, speak to me. For I am Resurrection and whoso believes in me will live again.
But his tongue doesn’t quiver. It says nothing.
Someone touched my shoulder and drew me back. It was Ma. Her mouth was a pale scar in her face. She gripped my fingers tightly. I looked down, saw that she had colored her hand with henna, and dropped it.
A shiny flaming orange heart, lanced in the middle, glistened on her palm.
~
It was dark enough to feel invisible. I left Ma praying in her room and went to Kala Pul.
Lights flickered in the streets and on chowrangis. Sad-faced vendors sold fake perfumes and plastic toys at traffic signals. Women with hollow eyes offered jasmine motia bracelets and necklaces and the flower’s scent filled my nose, removing Baba’s smell in death. Children fished for paan leaves and cigarette stubs in puddles, and I walked past them all.
Something dark lay in the middle of the road under a bright fluorescent median light. I raised a hand to block the glare and bent to look at it. An alley cat, a starved, mangy creature with a crushed back. Tread marks were imprinted on its fur; clots glistened between them. A chipped fang hung from one of whiskers.
~
I didn’t know my right hand was on it until I saw my fingertips curve. They pressed into the carcass like metal probes seeking, seeking. I didn’t even need to feel for a point. In death, the creature’s entire body was an enormous potential ready to be evoked.
I met the cat’s gaze. Lifeless eyes reflected the traffic light changing from green to red. I discharged.
A smell like charred meat, like sparks from metal screeching against metal, rust on old bicycle wheels. The creature arched its spine, its four legs locking together, so much tension in its muscles they thrummed like electric wires. Creaking, making a frothing sound, the alley cat flopped over to its paws and tried to stand.
It lives, I thought and felt no joy or satisfaction.
Blood trickled from the creature’s right eye. It tried to blink and the left eye wouldn’t open. It was glued shut with postmortem secretions.
My hand was hurting. I shook it, brought it before my eyes, looked at it. A large bulla had formed in the middle of the palm, blue-red and warm. Rubbing it gently, I got up and left, leaving the newly risen feline tottering around the traffic median, strange sounds emitting from its throat as if it were trying to remember how to mewl.
Deep inside the Christian muhallah I waded through rubble, piles of blackened bricks, and charred wood. I stood atop the destruction and imagined the fire consuming rows upon rows of these tiny shacks. Teetering chairs, plywood tables, meal mats, dung stoves, patchworked clothes—all set ablaze. Bricks fell, embers popped, and shadow fingers danced in the flames.
I shivered and turned to leave. Moonlight dappled the debris, shadows twisted, and as I made my way through the wreckage I nearly tripped over something poking from beneath a corrugated tin sheet.
I stooped to examine the object. It was a heavy, callused human hand, knuckles bruised and hairy like my father’s. Blood had clotted at the wrist and formed a puddle below the sharp edge of the tin.
A darkness turned inside my chest; rivers of blood pounded in the veins of my neck and forehead. I don’t know how long I sat in the gloom, in that sacred silence. Head bowed, fingers curled around the crushed man’s, I crouched with my eyes closed and groped for the meat of the city with my other hand’s fingertips. I felt for its faint pulse, I looked for its resurrection point; and when the dirt shivered and a sound like ocean surf surged into my ears, I thought I had found it.
I stiffened my shoulders, touched the dead man’s palm, and let the current flow.
The hand jerked, the fingers splayed. A sigh went through the shantytown. Somewhere in the dark bricks shifted. The ruins were stirring.
Something plopped on the tin sheet. I looked down. Fat drops of blood bulged from between my clenched knuckles. I let the dead hand go (it skittered to a side and began to thrash). I opened both of my fists and raised them to the sky.
A crop of raised, engorged bullas on my palms. One amidst the right cluster had popped and was bleeding. The pain was a steady ache, almost pleasant in its tingling. As I watched, blisters on the left palm burst as well and began to gush. Dark red pulsed and quivered its way down my wrists.
Trembling, I crouched on my haunches and grasped the dead man’s convulsing limb with both hands. I closed my eyes and jolted the Christian muhallah back to life. Then I sat back, rocking on my heels, and waited.
They came. Dragging their limbs off sparkling morgue tables, slicing through mounds of blessed dirt, wrenching free of rain-soaked grass, my derelict innocents seized and twitched their way across the city. I rose to my feet when they arrived, trailing a metallic tang behind them that drowned the smell of the jasmine. Metal rattled and clanged as my last finally managed to crawl out from under the tin sheet and joined the ranks of the faithful.
I looked at them one last time, my people, faces shining with blood and fervor. Their shredded limbs dangled. Autopsy incisions crisscrossed some’s naked flesh. Blackened men, women and children swaying in rows, waiting for me. How unafraid, joyous, and visible they were.
I raised my chin high and led my living thus on their final pilgrimage through this land of the dead.
The Old Gods of Light
Christina Sng
Godlike,
You sweep into our land
Through the thorny perimeter
Keeping predators like you away
From the most vulnerable of us,
Our children and our crops.
Yet you present yourself
As a benign force,
Offering gifts of technology
To lengthen our lives
And improve how we live,
As if the thousand years we have
Are not enough,
Nor are the peaceful ways
We farm and gather.
Foolishly,
We accept your offerings,
Curious as we are,
Enraging our jealous gods
Who turn our children
To dust while they play,
Extinguishing their lives
Before they have a chance
To live them.
Grief and fury consume us,
Betrayed by the gods
We once worshipped.
We turn to you to find meaning,
But all you offer are platitudes
That do not assuage us.
In violence,
We find relief,
Tying you up and quartering you,
A week-long celebration
Where our people scream and cheer
In a hate-fueled catharsis.
At the end,
Exhausted and broken,
We bury you in the ground
And overnight,
A forest sprouts up,
Almost as a surprise,
Covering the land
And engulfing us
Beneath its roots.
It takes to the sea,
Devouring its life,
Sucking it dry
Till there is nothing left
But an empty bowl
Twirling in the dust
Where you
crawl out,
Whole, and in a cold fury,
Abandoning our cursed land,
Now dead and blood-red
From the rusted metal
Of our unmoving machines.
You drift in the ether,
The empty space between worlds,
Drawn by light
To a new land,
One of blue and white,
Aquamarine-bright.
Sounds Caught in Cobwebs
M.E. Bronstein
Mother Lark used to say things like: “Your vows are something to take seriously. They are our one feeble contribution to the Harpist’s Song, before we dwindle down to notes, flecks of spider caught in the web of sound.”
Before she started falling apart, Mel told Vi how easily she had figured out her vows. Vi supposed she meant to be reassuring.
“I had my scroll in hand, and the first few times I dreamed, it was always blank,” said Mel. “Then, one night, the scroll had one word on it. Then the next night it had two, then three. They kind of grew into place, I guess. And I could feel out the cadence, how it would all fit into the Song. And when I woke up, the words stayed with me and I wrote them down.”
Vi imagined Mel’s words as flowers, pressed into a book, dried and flattened. Stuck between the pages of dream and waking.
Mother Lark had sent them to the attic, to dust and polish some of the relics that had gotten buried beneath too much cobweb. Mel and Vi sorted through old mahogany cabinets that had beveled glass doors. Some were so cluttered and dark that Vi and Mel had to explore them with flashlights; pale beams interrupted the shadows and scattered little floods of spider.
“Is it always like that?” asked Vi. “The words just—manifest? You don’t have to work to find them?”
Mel considered for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s how it was for me, anyway.”
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