Jimmy

by Omair Ahmad

  ‘No son, I’ve had tea.’

  As Jamaal stood, unsure, Rafiq said, ‘You asked once, at the mosque, whether it is right for a thief to steal from a tyrant.’

  That wasn’t exactly what Jamaal had asked, and it had been a long time ago, but he nodded.

  ‘Did you ever get an answer?’

  Jamaal almost blurted out, ‘No, you didn’t allow it.’ But he just shook his head.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ Rafiq said, ‘for years. For decades.’

  Jamaal still had no words to offer, none to risk, and it seemed that Rafiq, too, wasn’t interested in any. He closed his eyes, and appeared to fall asleep, the muscles of his face rearranging themselves so that Jamaal could see the roundness of his father’s natural features, marked by the lines that came of keeping them deliberately hard and still for long years.

  ‘I don’t know if there is an answer,’ Rafiq said finally, so softly that Jamaal could barely hear him.

  Then his voice took on strength, although he kept his eyes tightly closed. ‘No. I’m sorry, there is an answer. A clear and unambiguous one. It is wrong. The thief should be caught, condemned. But I don’t know if we have the strength to do that, not in a society where the tyrant rules. Maybe that is why tyranny is so cruel. It does not take away our knowledge of what we must do, just our strength to do so.’

  Jamaal’s face flushed and he could hear the sudden hammering of the blood in his veins. He could not believe that his father knew. That Khalid’s crimes had been discovered, and his own silence as well.

  Then Rafiq opened his eyes, and Jamaal realized that Rafiq did not know. Or even if he did, this was not what he was talking about. His gaze was focused elsewhere, somewhere far away, or maybe far inside of him; either way, it was a place where Jamaal could not go, and where Khalid did not exist.

  ‘Where you cannot live by your faith, there you must fight for it, or if you have not the strength, flee,’ Rafiq said, quoting the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. Jamaal had heard him quote them before, but always with fire and stone in his voice, not like this, not gently, in defeat, even in a kind of compassion.

  ‘What are you going to do after college?’ Rafiq asked.

  The question was so unexpected that Jamaal answered without thinking. ‘I will do an MBA. I’ll give the Common Admission Test for the IIMs.’

  Rafiq leaned back and looked at Jamaal uncertainly, blinking as if he was surprised to see him there. ‘Institutes of Management? They’re difficult to get into.’

  ‘Yes. But I can study hard,’ Jamaal replied.

  ‘Not the civil service exams?’ Rafiq asked. Those too were incredibly difficult, so Jamaal wondered a little at the question.

  ‘No,’ he said. And he knew that he did not need to explain to his father, of all people, why he did not wish to be part of the government, to wear khaki as a police officer, or drive in a car with a whirling blue light and siren. He did not want to be part of all that. He would take the CAT exam, would study hard, maybe even go to the tuition centres that were springing up. An MBA from an IIM guaranteed a salary that would allow him to live like a king. Or maybe, as his father said, to flee.

  ‘It would be good discipline if you had a job as well, while you study for those exams,’ Rafiq said.

  Jamaal nodded, not caring, lost in dreams.

  So Rafiq found the perfect arrangement for Jamaal: a part-time job as a typist in a shop that needed someone whose English was good enough to compose letters for all those endlessly applying for jobs, benefits, favours and a thousand other things that sustained them but were so hard to come by. The owner, Kamaal sahib, had been a classmate of Rafiq’s many years ago at St Jude’s, and the old connection still worked. Everybody took it for granted that Jamaal would only work there for a bit, until he made it through the MBA entrance exam. There were a few thousand others in the town also striving towards the same goal, but he was from St Jude’s, and there was more hope from him than from the others. Some days, the dream of a future kingly salary glowed off Jamaal like a soft, warm light.

  Jamaal was a bit of a dreamer, had always been, and that was what made him such a good typist on Kamaal sahib’s newly acquired computer. The little shop did good business with him there, and he even suggested a few words for lovers writing paeans of praise to their sweethearts in a language that was not their own. English in our parts is a mark of privilege, after all, and a potential lover always aspires to sophistication. Jamaal had read many poems as part of his English literature classes, and he plagiarized shamelessly. Keats and Byron would have been as bemused by the potential lovers as the lovers themselves were by the words that Jamaal suggested.

  The mood of love affected Jamaal too. He didn’t lose his heart, but he began to ready himself for its consequences. He printed out, in bold letters, lines from one of his favourite poems by Yeats and put them up on the wall above his desk: ‘Never give all the heart, for love/ Will hardly seem worth thinking of/ To passionate women if it seem/ Certain, and they never dream/ That it fades out from kiss to kiss/ For everything that’s lovely is/ But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.’

  All the mention of kisses and passion was a bit daring in Moazzamabad. Jamaal was lucky that it was Kamaal sahib who was his boss. A person who had studied at a school other than St Jude’s might have been scandalized, but Kamaal sahib only smiled, and said, ‘Oh, Yeats. I always liked him.’ Jamaal often found his customers silently mouthing the words of the poem when he looked up at them as he worked on their letters.

  It all seemed to work well and Kamaal sahib decided to give Jamaal a small raise after his third month at the shop.

  And then they killed Maulana Qayoom.

  It was a misunderstanding. Not his murder, but what led to it. A man was sitting eating his dinner at a dhaba. He was also drinking from a brown glass bottle. The bottle had a label that he could barely read, and would never be able to pronounce, but it made him slightly drunk, and that was all he cared about.

  The owner of the dhaba had been staring suspiciously at the man for the last half hour, the drunk diner was not just taking his time to finish, his presence meant that many others were avoiding the place. Finally, as a wedding party approached slowly from up the street, the owner asked the man to pay and leave.

  ‘What?’ the man asked, and his hand moved suddenly. The bottle, slick with his sweat, slipped out of his hand and shattered as it fell.

  Both the diner and the dhaba owner stared down at the mess at their feet.

  ‘You broke my bottle,’ the drunk said, and slapped the owner.

  This was too much for the dhaba owner, and he yelled back at his son, ‘Amit, get my cleaver, quick. I’m going to teach this bastard a lesson.’

  The threat was only meant to inspire fear, and it succeeded beyond the dhaba owner’s expectations. The drunk wailed, and spinning around, plunged headlong into the wedding party, right into the centre, where the women were dancing. He pawed and clawed as he tried to get through the sudden throng of brightly coloured celebrants.

  The shrieks of the frightened women silenced the crowd, and because these were women who rarely ventured out onto the street, the fury of the men who were supposed to be guarding them was beyond description. Maybe it was also because this was a Muslim wedding party, and the Muslims of Moazzamabad had lived in fear for many years now, watching Manoj Tripathi rise from being a nobody priest, to mayor, and now a Member of the Legislative Assembly through a long, steady campaign of insult and intimidation. So, when the drunk attacked their women, their rage knew no bounds.

  He was dead long before the police could get there.

  And the next day, before curfew was declared, but when rumour had already sped out into the town, three of Manoj Tripathi’s men spotted Maulana Qayoom walking down the road. One of them had a can of kerosene that he had been taking to the Hanuman mandir for its generator. Now the men thought it could be put to better use. They had never seen a human burn before, but they had all h
eard the stories: Nobody screamed louder and longer for mercy than a man on fire. So after they beat the old man to the ground, they emptied the can of kerosene over his body. He was unconscious when they poured the kerosene on him, which you would think was for the best, but it saved him only from an animal fear. He wasn’t spared the pain. For, when the match fell on him and his body exploded first into a ball of blue and then into yellow-brown flames, Maulana Jalali Qayoom was brought back to his senses.

  The three men watched, fascinated, as the old man’s skin burned and peeled away and he screamed and screamed. And when he collapsed, they watched the flesh turn white and the fat melt and run. Then they realized that the police would be coming, and fled from the burning man. It was only later, at the temple, among their compatriots, that they claimed credit for it.

  Curfew was clamped down again. In the temple they ran short of kerosene the next day, and the loudspeakers went silent during the daily power cut, but nobody there blamed the three men for the nuisance.

  16

  Jamaal could not attend the last prayer for Maulana Qayoom; the curfew was only relaxed three days later, and the burial had already taken place by then. Instead he went to pray at the grave. Somehow, though, words failed him. He couldn’t recall the Arabic that the Maulana had taught him, and finally, out of desperation, he prayed in Urdu, a language that he could understand, and hoped God would as well.

  It was a heretical thought. Just as the thought that they had made half a Hindu out of the Maulana at his death, cremating him before he was buried. The thought struck him as he made his way out of the graveyard, and he wanted to laugh, to laugh very hard indeed, but he didn’t. Perhaps if he had, he would not have trembled through the day like a wound-up toy.

  It isn’t surprising, then, that the small incident later that day had the impact it did. A group of young men came to the shop and demanded to see the owner. Kamaal sahib came hurriedly, because that is how good men respond when faced by a group of young men in saffron bandanas wielding staffs and tridents.

  Their leader said simply, ‘We are collecting money for the temple.’

  He did not have to mention which temple, or who they were. Everybody recognized Manoj Tripathi’s men. There was only one temple whose prosperity was based on the money collected from traders and small businessmen like this owner of a typing and photocopying shop, a frightened man paying a tax to someone else’s god.

  Kamaal sahib was neither theologian nor lawyer. He reached into his drawer and withdrew two hundred-rupee notes, a little over twice the amount Jamaal earned in a day, and dropped it into the tin presented before him. He knew from long experience that this was just the amount that would spare him humiliation, or worse, and not wipe out his day’s profit.

  The leader of the troop sneered, and then turned and walked across the road with his little following to the next shop. There were policemen at the crossroads. They respectfully greeted the saffron bandanas.

  Jamaal did not realize he was weeping until Kamaal sahib came up to him and suggested that he should go for a tea break. But Jamaal could only sit there and weep for the hopes he had had and the future he had seen.

  Maybe it was his education that was to blame. He should never have studied history. In the textbooks he had read, it was a subject of hope, of promises and dreams. When he and countless others like him read Indian history in school, they often thought, for this was what they were encouraged to think, as we were before them: ‘Now we are free. Now is our time. Now the world will see.’

  It wasn’t that poverty and pain, oppression and corruption were forgotten, his teacher at St Jude’s had said, but after so long being the slaves of the English, any dawn when the sun did not rise on British lands was a good one. And tomorrow could only be better than yesterday; that was what the history books promised.

  Jamaal saw that day what his tomorrow would be. He could see himself taking out the money and putting it into the tin without protest, grateful for being spared any damage and harm. It would not matter if he earned as little as he did or, after the fabled IIM MBA, earned a king’s ransom. He knew that he didn’t have the strength to oppose this, challenge those men not much older than him, and the state would look at him from across the street, dressed in official khaki, and pay its respects to his intimidators. There was no place to which he could flee. This was his home. Wherever he went, it would go with him.

  Another man in his position might have recovered soon enough, or plotted vague revenge and carried on. But Jamaal lost all hope that day and a heavy weight crushed his heart. He found himself gasping, and turned his face to the wall so Kamaal sahib would not see him.

  And then, when the pain lessened, he felt that it had swept away blockages in his heart and his mind, and another part of him was shouldering its way through. That evening, when he was sitting in his house, listening to the usual sounds of the street getting busy before the silence of another night, Jimmy the terrorist rose up within him and walked to the kitchen. He took the knife out of the drawer, the old knife that he remembered so well, and he stuck it next to himself in the old way. The metal was cold against his skin for a moment, and then it remembered its home.

  Maybe the knife would have been the end of it. Jamaal would have walked to work with Jimmy the terrorist hidden within him, clutching the knife, the grip weakening day by day. Once in a while a certain word, a certain sentence would have brought Jimmy the terrorist rising up into Jamaal’s eyes, only to withdraw, disappointed or diffident. It could not have lasted long. Jamaal was getting older, and some of his contemporaries in town had even married. Or he might have actually cleared the MBA exam. Ambition or domesticity would have dulled his anger, leeched it. And in the delight of his children he would in some years have forgotten Jimmy, the man who had appeared, fully formed, inside him that ordinary evening.

  It was not meant to be.

  Jamaal went to see a movie instead. It was Bandit Queen, based on the life of Phoolan Devi—you remember her? The lower-caste dacoit who came through horror to become a politician? Jamaal had not been able to summon the energy to watch it the first time it was shown, despite the controversy surrounding it. He hadn’t the stomach, then, for gritty stories from his backyard. He did now—at least he was confused and angry enough to attempt it, almost as an act of defiance. The film was being shown at one of the cheaper movie theatres this time; it wouldn’t be much of a loss if he did not like it.

  It could be that other things were working too, who knows? There are those who believe that Fate stalks every life, forcing us, without us knowing, onto the paths we take. But if we must believe in Fate, then why should there be only one? A hundred thousand destinies could be stalking humanity, picking and choosing, raising up and discarding. It could be that more than one Fate works on a single person—and what happens if their separate interests collide? What happens to the puppet when the puppeteers clash? That’s a question for us to ponder.

  The movie was a rebirth for Jamaal. A harsh story, brutally told, it dragged him out from a decade of snivelling self-absorption. The pain that had allowed him to believe that he was somewhat special was rendered petty and shallow, and for the first time since he had hidden under his bed for fear of the mobs that never came, Jamaal saw someone else’s pain.

  He couldn’t accept it. When Phoolan was being raped, the second time in the film, or the third, with matter-of-fact, mechanical violence in the drab and broken countryside, Jamaal rose and blindly staggered out of the theatre.

  The air was chill and cleared his mind for a moment, and then he saw the policemen and the woman.

  He didn’t have to be told that she was a prostitute; there are things even an unworldly young man in a small town learns to tell. It probably would not have mattered much to him if he had known that the violence being inflicted on her was nothing to the woman; her uncle had inflicted much greater punishment when he forced her into the trade at age thirteen. This was only friendly persuasion, and it was a result
of her own mistake. She had heard that there were customers to be had where this particular movie was being shown. Men came out wanting sex, and she had heard that they took pleasure in pain, but she needed the money. She should have realized, though, that every area has its own predators, and these policemen were not the usual ones she paid off.

  It was the inspector who saw Jamaal first. He was not so focused on the woman and had left the task of her education to his two juniors. As befitted a man of his rank, Inspector Rawat merely watched and directed the beating and threats of rape. Jamaal’s exit from the theatre had been covered by the noise of the movie running inside the hall. This was not one of those posh places with soundproof walls, and the doors had been left open; but as Jamaal stepped into the light the policeman saw him out of the corner of his eye and turned.

  Rawat was somewhat bored, and a little frustrated. He owed his superiors some money and he had thought that the woman would have something for him, but the little whore had nothing except pleas for mercy. The young man coming out of the movie theatre became a natural target of his irritation.

  ‘What do you think you’re looking at, gaandu?’ he said to Jamaal, and then leered, ‘You want a little?’

  Jamaal spat. It did not come out exactly how he had anticipated, his mouth was too dry with sudden rage, and the spittle sprayed across the inspector’s face.

  The inspector did not react for a few second; he was that surprised. The two constables had turned at the sound of his voice, and now were stock-still. When Rawat finally spoke, wiping his face, his voice was clear and unruffled.

  ‘Chaudhri, Kumar, see that the haraamzaada doesn’t escape,’ he said to his men, and then addressed Jamaal in a soothing, even loving, voice, ‘Now, my little one, let us see about you.’

  As they moved to hem Jamaal in, Rawat said, again in a soft, affectionate tone, ‘Tell me your name, son.’