Red Birds

by Mohammed Hanif

  When my folks don’t have a real explanation, they blame it on war. As if before the war we were all a brotherhood and didn’t throw our trash into our neighbour’s yard. As if war gave us bad breath and crude manners. It’s like me saying that my Mutt ancestors ruled this land and then came the war and their glorious reign came to an end.

  Doctor steals bad vegetables from the vegetable shop and calls himself a progressive. He believes that if we all started eating healthily the world would become a much better place. What can you do about him? We need a doctor even if he behaves as though he doesn’t need us.

  I know where the red birds come from. You will strain your imagination to believe me and point to a certain incident that fried my brains and turned me into a teller of tales, but Mutts can’t afford to believe in myths. Or metaphors. A bone is not a metaphor. An electric pole doesn’t symbolize phallic fantasies, it’s a public convenience, and as I learnt to my cost, a brain-damaging hazard.

  Red birds are real. The reason we don’t see them is because we don’t want to. Because if we see them, we’ll remember. When someone dies in a raid or a shooting or when someone’s throat is slit, their last drop of blood transforms into a tiny red bird and flies away. And then reappears when we are trying hard to forget them, when we think we have forgotten them, when we think we have learnt to live without them, when we utter those stupid words that we have ‘moved on’. It’s just a reminder that they may have gone but they haven’t really left yet. They have not forgotten us. It reminds us that they might be gone but they miss us. We might go about our lives pretending they are not there anymore – we might give their clothes away, we might put away their notebooks in the bottom drawer, we might insist on remembering only the clever and funny things they said and plaster a permanently youthful smile on their faces, but all we need to do is look up and there they are.

  I might be wrong. But Mutts are rarely wrong about birds. Mutts know a thing or two about love. Mutts don’t breed in sewers all by themselves. They are the result of other Mutts making love. When you see a spotted brown Mutt with hazel eyes you can bet that it’s senior Mutt’s afternoon lust that also lives on in the form of a half-brother or a sister.

  When I see the red bird I growl. Momo likes it when I growl. He usually says, hey my tiger. But this morning Momo remains under the jeep and says, shut up Mutt. I like it when he says my name. When he says shut up he only means, go on my tiger, growl a bit more.

  I am hesitant to tell Momo about the red birds. Humans can be pedantic. They’ll believe in someone sitting up there in the sky manufacturing bread and milk and strange sexual urges, they’ll believe in souls, in djinns and fairy tales and sea monsters with breasts and fins, and political theories about the uses of inequality, but tell them where the red bird comes from and they’ll shake their head as if you are trying to convert them to some Mutt religion.

  Another reason I am reluctant to tell Momo about the red birds is that at heart he is a businessman. Even when he is watching television, even when his jeep breaks down, even when he is having murderous thoughts about his Father Dear, he is always working on a business plan which will make him fabulously rich. He has traded in nothing but junk but he is waiting for the ‘markets to open up, for the situation to stabilize, for the reconstruction phase to begin’ before he can embark on his financial adventures. What comes after war? he is fond of saying. Reconstruction. And what do we need for reconstruction? Cement. Yes. But what else? You can’t build cities just with cement. What is the other ingredient you need to build cities? You need sand. And we have got nothing but sand, zillions of tons of it. We can reconstruct the whole world with this sand. Hell, we can build an entire galaxy with our sand. And who owns all the sand? That’s the foundation of his new company called Sands Global.

  I know what he would want to do if he saw the red birds. He would see marketing potential. He would want to trap them. He would do his cost-benefit ratio analysis. He would think of giant nets. He would think Americans would pay top dollars for them. Arab sheikhs will want them for breakfast for their mysterious magical qualities. Two hundred dollars a pop. He has been spending too much time watching late-night Nat Geo, where it’s wall-to-wall animal cruelty. He thinks real life is the last ever sequel of Fast and Furious. Lady Flowerbody is doing strange thought experiments on him. You spend enough time with American-sponsored researchers and you start liking mustard, which smells of unrequited love. And you learn to say words like ‘buck’ and ‘pop’. You begin to think you can make money out of sand and beautiful birds. Imagine selling the souls of your loved ones so that some horny sheikh can devour them to get a stiffy. You sell the memories of your dearest ones as part of the backdrop decor at some fancy wedding reception. Imagine the red birds fluttering in gilded cages. Imagine your most private grief as a party decoration.

  CHAPTER 11

  Ellie

  Momo, the driver boy, has got two cushions on his driving seat so that he can be level with the steering wheel and he has to slip down and almost stand on the accelerator to keep the vehicle moving. I am not sure if this driver can even look out of the windscreen. But it doesn’t really matter, because I can see outside and there is nothing but sand. I shouldn’t have finished the whole flask of water in one go, my stomach is a wheat grinder churning out pure pain.

  Momo turns towards the passenger seat after every few minutes and says, ‘Who loves you, Mutt? Who loves you?’ When the mutt doesn’t respond the boy honks and screams: ‘Mutttttt. We are going home, Mutt. Don’t you want to go home, Mutt? Fast and furious, faster. We are gonna get you a doctor, we are gonna get you a bandage and you are gonna be fine. You are gonna roar like a tiger again.’

  Mutt has got his nose stuck to the glass window, he whimpers in a non-dog-like voice and seems to be contemplating that eternal question: Can one ever really go back home?

  ‘You shouldn’t have been greedy,’ says the boy-driver to me as I hold my stomach and moan. ‘When you gonna be greedy, your stomach gonna hurt.’

  ‘I was thirsty,’ I mumble. ‘I was very thirsty. I am in pain.’

  ‘An American in pain, God help us. An American in pain is a fucking pain in the ass of this universe,’ he says without looking towards me.

  I can’t believe the cruelty of this fifteen-year-old. Where is his humanity? Here I am dying after starving for eight days, and the boy is accusing me of excessive consumption.

  I shut my eyes and hunker down in the seat and think of all the lessons I learnt in my Cultural Sensitivity course. ‘There are many reasons they hate us and one of those reasons is our love for our pets,’ our ‘Cultural Sensitivity Towards Animals’ module instructor had told us in our ‘How To Defend American Values Without Offending Their Own’ seminar. ‘They think the money we spend on dog shampoos could feed the entire population of a Central African country. And they don’t even know about the Americans who feed live rats to their pet pythons and hug them before going to sleep.’ This kid driving me is a specimen of that very culture. I also hate that culture now; any culture that cares for whiney mutts more than it cares for starving humans lost in the middle of a desert needs a Cultural Sensitivity crash course. And we are not talking any stray humans, we are talking pilots, pilots on a mission, not the zoomies with rainbows on their chests, not the ones who go around spraying pesticides over forests, we are talking proper operational pilots on top- secret missions.

  This mutt is going home. This mutt has a name, even if it’s just Mutt. This mutt is getting love. I haven’t even been asked my name. I know the boy’s name because he keeps saying Momo loves you to his mutt.

  I should be relieved, I should be happy that I am being driven out of the desert where I have been trapped for eight days and nights. But I am pissed off, because I am not getting the attention that someone who has survived eight days in a hellish desert should get. I feel that after all those near-death experiences, after all the sacrifices I have made for the country, I am being treated like an
unwanted hitchhiker. One moment you are facing certain death in a desert, the next moment you are in a car sulking about your saviour’s bad manners.

  The last meal I had was an aspirin and a coffee. I wish I had saved it for now.

  ‘You work for USAID?’ Momo asks, taking an abrupt turn for no obvious reason as there is no difference between left and right, there are no tracks, no signposts to a destination – as far as I can see, it’s all sand.

  ‘Sort of,’ I say and realize that I don’t have a cover story. In all my misery I have forgotten to think up where I have come from, and why. I am supposed to have an elaborate story. What the fuck am I doing in the middle of a desert wearing a flying suit, starving myself to death? Am I the weakest link in some desert safari which has left me behind? I had thought about a cover story during the first few days, but my brain draws a blank now. Fleetingly I remember half the Strike Eagle but that is more than five days’ walk away. Even if they found it they wouldn’t make the connection.

  Perhaps I don’t need a cover story. If USAID is here and its staff comprises fifteen-year-old drivers, I can probably tell them any old crap, get some clean clothes, some medical attention, say thank you and then hop on to a homeward-bound US chopper which, I hope, would not be flown by a cocky teenager.

  ‘Do you work for USAID?’ I ask, trying to create a bond, or at least the possibility of sharing a joke or getting some information about the outbound flights. What I really want to ask him is why the fuck aren’t you at school? Have you got a driving licence? Why are you dressed in a football kit? But I don’t ask any of it. I only say: Do you work for USAID?

  My own cover story should be simple; I could pass off as a pilot, on my way to delivering humanitarian aid, bringing in a plane load of rations, lots of footballs and candy, my plane crash-landed, and I was lost. Perfect. I am about to faint with hunger but my brain is still capable of coming up with believable scenarios. I’m a survivor, I am someone who can think on his feet even when he can’t stand on them.

  ‘I am too young to get a job,’ says Momo with disdain, as if I have asked him about an embarrassing family secret. ‘I am self-employed. You could call me an entrepreneur.’

  I am relieved. I haven’t been captured by some horny goatherds or bloodthirsty enemy combatants but by decent people who are self-employed and care about dogs. It’s the kind of community where little boys pull themselves up by their bootstraps. The kind of place where they hopefully have flushable toilets and hot food. I shut my eyes and think of a medium-rare rib steak with a dollop of gravy on the side and a glass full of ice cubes.

  The sand is whirling all around us and I have no idea how Momo is navigating his way. These are desert folk, they know it like the back of their hand, I tell myself. I trust this boy. A fifteen-year-old boy who has gone and rescued his injured dog is not likely to lose his way or abandon a fellow human being. He represents the best that the desert has to offer. This kid is our future. This kid is our hope. ‘This is what I respect about Arab culture. You guys pull yourselves up by the bootstraps. Make something of yourself despite your circumstances. America used to have the same values but. . . ’

  ‘Who told you that I’m an Arab?’ Momo roars with laughter. ‘Look, Mutt, this man thinks we are Arabs. Don’t give us ideas, we might become Arabs. Mutt, don’t you wish you were an Arab?’

  I faint with exhaustion and dream of vanilla shakes and pancakes that are stacked so tall they look like skyscrapers leaning into each other.

  When I wake up we’re approaching a massive structure that rises out of the sand like a concrete mirage. Miles and miles of barbed wire runs around it. Every few metres there is a very tall observation post laden with sandbags. The only colours in this grey-on-grey horror are the orange and white stripes of a windsock that hangs limp. A large sign says NOT A THOROUGHFARE. This gives me hope. A place with a white and orange windsock must have an airfield or at least a proper helipad. A place that’s not a thoroughfare must be a safe passage meant for me. But our jeep takes an abrupt turn.

  First we pass a series of abandoned checkpoints and sandbag bunkers and then arrive at a dirt track. We pass a donkey chewing on a plastic shopping bag, a few camels stand in the middle of the track; the boy almost falls over the jeep horn but the camels keep looking up towards the sky like a group of amateur cloud-spotters until, after a while, they slowly clear out as if disappointed by what they have seen.

  ‘Stubborn like American,’ Momo curses at the camels as the jeep starts to move again. What’s with the fake American accent if he hates us so much? Why has he cursed the camels and called them American? He’s obviously a wannabe Arab or from one of those countries that hate America because they aren’t America. What does he know about my stubbornness? Me, I’ve always been easy-going – and given the circumstances there’s not much choice.

  There’s a huge gate in the distance, like the entrance to a grand old city. The gate looks familiar. There is nothing around the gate – no walls, no fence – as if someone has erected the gate in the hope that walls will build themselves.

  The top of the gate has something written on it, the letters are faded but carry an authority that still seems to hold, like a paean to a dead king. I bend forward, shooting pain in my stomach still shooting, and try to read the writing on the gate: USAID FUGEE CAMP. The RE seems to have dislodged itself out of embarrassment.

  I guess it might have been a village once but now it’s only a settlement of sorts. I have never seen a refugee camp for real, only in pictures and TV news. I expect neat rows of tents, gleaming ambulances, people standing in orderly queues waiting to get their rations from gap-year students with dreadlocks and nose rings. What I see is what I have already seen on my Strike Eagle’s monitor, just before I hesitated to press the button: a series of junkyards, rows of burnt-out cars piled on each other, abandoned tanks and armoured vehicles, a small mountain of disused keyboards and mobile phone shells, piles of rubbish with smoke rising off them.

  The camp is a sea of corrugated blue plastic roofs, stretching like a low, filthy sky, broken by piles of grey plastic poles and overflowing blue plastic rubbish bins. This is the kind of place where evil festers, Colonel Slatter had said. All I can see are failed attempts at starting kitchen gardens, neat squares marked with pebbles, half-grown stumps in little plastic pots. NO LITTERING signs over piles of litter. This seems like a failing effort to keep some distance between children and the impending plague.

  This place needed no help from the skies.

  What was I thinking? What was Colonel Slatter thinking? He came to bomb this place because he thought it was an existential threat to our great nation. He was doing his duty and I have done mine. Your zoomie goes down, you follow.

  You’d think one-sided wars would have become boring by now. But they still keep at it. There are no dogfights now, none of that go after your enemy’s tail and chew it up; mostly you are chasing your own tail as nobody seems to own fighter aircraft anymore. Down there they run around in vans or convoys of trucks like an army of ants scrambling towards a hole – or running away from it, it doesn’t really matter. Or they stay in their compounds and watch TV. There are obvious ethical objections to calling the compounds houses, even though you can zoom in to see what’s cooking in their pots. You can do the closest of close-ups but you still can’t tell for sure if they are discussing a cut of lamb or planning to bring down western civilization. What you see on your screen is a traditional family, traditional because you see a group of men in a courtyard, reclining in their plastic chairs or on carpets watching TV, a brick house with a satellite dish on the roof, children playing catch in the courtyard. You circle, you pause. On your map the house is marked as a compound inhabited by enemy combatants. Now you’re up there and you can’t tell whether you are about to target enemies plotting an atrocity or innocent civilians waiting for dinner. You have two and a half seconds to make up your mind.

  I hate those words: innocent civilians. Makes soldie
rs sound like child molesters.

  As we pass the gate, there’s an open-air school on the edge of an open sewer, with two buffaloes and about a dozen girls staring at an empty blackboard. Another open jeep overtakes us, it has half a dozen teenagers in the back, carrying rocket launchers, one of them waves at us. Momo ignores them. I half-raise a hand and then check myself. We pass a few rundown shops, a row of skinned chickens gathering dust on a wire, a couple of vehicles with a stack of bricks in place of tyres, a pair of teenagers taking their siesta under the vehicles, a man in a white coat tending to a drought-ridden vegetable garden, a few men and women sitting on the sand and occasionally looking up towards the sky.

  ‘Thieves, all of them, like you,’ the boy looks towards me and sneers. ‘They are always looking for a plane. Can’t drive a jeep, but always going into the desert, thinking, ho ho ho, I’ll find some fighter plane there. No desert rabbits, now. Just looking for metal scrap. Some people are always gonna be losers.’

  Should I be worried about these gun-toting plane-spotters? Have they found my Strike Eagle yet? Is this teenager driving me the shepherd from Colonel Slatter’s legend, a bored, cold-blooded killer? Am I a welcome guest in the camp or about to become a prized prisoner, a bargaining chip to be traded for tinned food?

  ‘Guess who loves you, Mutt,’ the boy turns his head towards the mutt and shouts. ‘Guess who is coming home, Mutt. Our war hero.’

  In the Camp

  CHAPTER 12

  Mutt

  Call me self-important, call me an attention-seeker, call me a miserable little self-important Mutt, but I do have a minor regret about the night the bomb fell on our house.

  They were all settling in for the night, I was getting ready for my night patrol when Bro Ali came running, shouting get out of the house, out of the house. I was a little bit annoyed, because isn’t it my job to sound the alarm, to issue warnings? But Bro Ali was running about like a crazed prophet and managed to create suitable panic, so of course I helped out by yapping at the sky, where I could already pick out the slow, familiar rumble of a plane approaching.