“It’s been a while.”
“Hasn’t it?” He grimaced and shifted his leg. “These bahanchod pins. They told me they don’t hurt after the first few days, but my leg is on fire.”
“Maybe put a little salt on the dressing,” I suggested.
“Oh, fuck off now.” He chuckled. His face was a bit pale, a sheen of sweat on his forehead. “I hope the leg’s not infected.”
I told him it wasn’t. The leg looked fine, it really did. Nice and healthy, warm and pink. It was a surprise when three days later Khan Bhai was hospitalized.
On the fourth they took the leg.
* * *
I tell her he is crazy, no point in wasting time, but Amina is bent upon due diligence.
She goes to the police, she asks around. She harangues the forensics team until they issue her a permit allowing her to revisit the villa and the godown in Shahdara. The bloodstains have been scrubbed, the piles of tiny clothing removed, the tagged plastic bags with earrings and bracelets and warding amulets long submitted as evidence; but the metal chain, polished until it shines, still hangs from the ceiling. The rich coppery smell lingers.
Amina tries to enter the basement. The door is locked.
In the godown she upends the few remaining gunnysacks. A thin sprinkle of grain, wheat dust, nothing else, she tells me later.
No hourglass anywhere.
“The man is delusional,” I repeat. “You do you see that, no?”
Amina and I go to the newspaper office to discuss potential interviews with the two boys hiding in his villa when he was arrested. Both have been sentenced as accomplices to several years in prison. We are told it would take a week to get security clearance for either to talk to us.
“There have been threats against the three of them,” Nadeem Bhai says. He is a tall, lanky man with wild Manto hair and round horn-rimmed glasses. “That is the reason he turned himself in publicly, you know, after the letter he sent. Matter of time before he was found and lynched. Maybe killed extrajudicially by a cop.”
“Folks in Shahdara knew him well. His history of violence. Sexual abuse of minors. An incident from years ago when he was nearly beaten to death by a mob,” Amina says. “This wasn’t his first play.”
“No,” Nadeem Bhai says. “It wasn’t.”
“We all know much of what he’s saying is bullshit,” Amina says. “We have normal, healthy kids who lead normal, healthy lives. We all went to regular schools with regular kids and their regular, normal parents. What I’m wondering—what has been keeping me up at night—is”—she leans forward—“how could’ve things come to a head like this? How come no one in that neighborhood figured out what was going on in that house and that godown? Are we that blind to what’s right in front of us?”
Nadeem Bhai looks at her and says nothing.
* * *
Everybody knew a cannibal lived in the graveyard near Kabootar Poora. He was tall and graceless with long shaggy hair, his body covered in black oil, maybe it was tar. His teeth were crooked (but very sharp); his eyes, slit and peeled like the inside of an onion. At dusk if you walked near the market wall of the graveyard—a broil of branches bore down on the sidewalk there—a shadow would swoop and drop on you, an oily weight, and you’d never be seen again.
Stories of its seizures of little children were rampant. Hadi, the chowkidar’s son, had seen one with his own eyes.
I was never seized, even though I walked those streets at night. The day would end, the sun would slink away, its weak orange tail between its legs, and I would sneak out of the house and race to Kabootar Poora, where Sheeda the shopkeeper would give me leftover soda from a prior customer. I would tip the bottle
What is the meal prayer?
In the name of Allah the Beneficent and Merciful
and chug it, letting the iced liquid soothe my parched and raw throat. Lub lub lub. Dub dub.
The graveyard near Kabootar Poora was hauntingly beautiful. Marble tombstones dappled with sunlight surrounded by solemn peepul, banyan, and neem. Mounds of baked earth beneath a web of ancient branches and limbs, leaves drifting in still air. Is there a mystery more charming than the calligraphy on ancient gravestones?
A barbecue vendor had set up shop by the eastern wall of the graveyard. We often joked his kebabs were the best in the city for a reason. I remember one night vaulting the wall of our home, Salman in the lead—he always was the brave one—his eyes gleaming like a cat’s, racing to the bazaar. We swigged Coke, smoked a couple cigarettes, kicked over a brand-new bicycle near the video game arcade, then fled to the graveyard, where we stole a couple seekhs from the vendor and munched kebabs all the way home. Or were they leg pieces? Sometimes I suppose it’s difficult for children to remember, even if they were paid sweets to remember, or sometimes to forget, and in the spaces between remembering and forgetting are—
I think there was a rustle in the bushes, a shadow that had followed us. I saw it rush at Salman, but we got lucky because there was a muhallah chowkidar making his rounds and Salman yelled and the chowkidar came running, and that was that.
What is the Proclamation of Faith?
I bear witness that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger.
We could have been witness to so much more but we weren’t. We were lucky that night. No cannibal ever dragged us into an old house where jinns lived harmoniously with mad old ladies. No one ever seized me, or knocked me about, seriously hurt me. I was fortunate that way.
Lub lub lub. Tap tap. Tick tick.
Tick tick go my earliest memories, dim-lit, colorless. Certain smells—laddoo, black plum, coconut oil—may flood some of them with color for the briefest instant, then like the aftermath of a lightning crack, they return to lifelessness.
In one I sit in our room in the old family house with a tall chador-clad maid next to me. Fiercely I grip her hands, my eyes locked with hers. I am small, no more than four, and I gaze up at her and say, “This world is nothing. What comes after it’s done ticking is the real thing.” She is silent, looming, ink-faced. I can’t tell if she listens raptly or is somewhere far away. “I have seen this clearly,” I say. “So clearly.”
No color, no sound, no stirring of life in this memory, this room, our old house, in the comfortless proximity of this tall, brooding maid toward whom I have no feelings. I don’t remember her face, her name, the feel of her hands, her gaze, her shadow on me. I cannot smell that chador, although I have smelled dozens like it since.
“I know it,” I say. “I know it.”
Sometimes I can hold this memory in my hand. I try to feel its ends and follow them, but here remembrance breaks and I find myself in mazing corridors.
The next thing I remember is a dream I dreamed a few times as a boy:
Salman and I are walking home from the graveyard, gnawing on pink-red chicken legs, large as a baby’s. The moon is full and then it’s not, and from the bower of banyan and peepul limbs overhead a shadow drops and we startle and run. This time no chowkidar shows up with a lantern in one hand and a large whistle in the other, no sharp warning sound: Fleee Fleeee. Instead the shadow, oil-limbed and glistening, chases after us. We sprint, panting, until Salman trips over a cluster of bushes and drops, and the shadow falls over him.
Terrified, I scramble up a tree and watch them wrestle. The boy twists and thrashes; the shadow pins the boy’s arms behind his back. A twinkle of moonlight on metal on the shadow’s forearm; it turns him around, fumbling with his shorts. The boy screams and the shadow shoves its fist into the boy’s back. Tick goes the metal-thing on the shadow’s forearm
It’s a Rolex, a beautiful, expensive Rolex, I think
and the boy’s vision is filled with dirt and bramble. Above him is the ink face of the sky pressing itself into the boy’s neck and back, an urgent paucity of moonlight, any light, and the boy stops moaning ev
en as the shadow begins.
Tap tap. Tick tick. Tick tick. TICK TICK!
The frequency of the ticking, the tapping by the boy’s head increases; as if someone is hammering on a giant iron door. So fast now, as if there is a gurgle in the earth.
Sometime later the shadow is up and gone. Salman staggers from the bushes, his chest hitching. I climb down and we try to walk home, but we are confused; around us darkness has swept in deeper and more palpable than we have ever known. The roads, streets, and alleys don’t make sense, the gutters are overflowing. I look at Salman but his face is a watery mirror of mine; his eyes are like holes in an old, withered tree. Soon we come upon the doorstep of a small, narrow two-storied house near Kabootar Poora. A large marble plaque proclaims a terse message that glitters, suddenly moonlit:
100
We fumble with the door handle and pile in when the door opens.
* * *
“Did you find it?”
“No.”
“They took it when they searched my house.”
“No one saw it. No one has it.” Amina watches him tilt his chin and scratch it with a dirty, uneven fingernail. His beard has grown out in a salt-and-pepper fuzz. “If you tell me where you hid it, maybe I can try again or have someone else look.”
He leans back in his chair, studying her. He has the same turtleneck on he wore the last time we came. “The hourglass has sat on top of my cupboard for years. I’ve never allowed anyone to touch it. After sending the letter, when I had to go underground for a few weeks, I took it with me to a friend’s haweli inside Delhi Gate but I brought it back later. It was in my bedroom when I went to your paper. It was in my bedroom when they called the police. You cannot miss it. It isn’t exactly dead, you know.”
“It ticks?”
“Yes.”
“The hourglass? Your mother’s hourglass ticks?”
“Yes. Quite loudly, too.”
Amina tongues the inside of her upper lip, gives me a sidelong glance. I raise my eyebrows. “Do you know how long it has been ticking? Does it have batteries?” I say.
He smiles at me with his teeth. “You think I’m crazy.”
“What do you think?”
“You think I don’t know how hourglasses work? I do, you smug chootiyay. But this one is different. My mother, she—” He fidgets in his chair, pulls up the edge of his sweater so it cushions his chin. “My mother, my grandparents weren’t ordinary people. We’ve had miracles in our family for generations. That hourglass, it has been ticking for as long as I can remember. It is a wonderful thing, a fabulous thing. It told me my destiny, it has comforted me for years and years. It has comforted my boys, my poor hungry boys. It has called—”
Soft like silk, Amina says, “I’d say you’re full of shit.”
He goes still. Amina’s pockmarks are flushed, the red imbuing deep shadows to them. I think I see them tremble with her heartbeat.
“I spoke to the policeman who questioned your boys. Your boys don’t remember seeing an hourglass or a clock in your house. They said you hated timepieces, that there was none in the villa—”
“The hourglass is not that—”
“—That you told them not to go near a cupboard in your bedroom, but they thought it was because you kept all your money there—”
“—Easy to see. It can hide itself from the wrong sort—”
“—And the police found some of the tagged plastic packets in that cupboard. They were filled with…souvenirs from the dead children.”
Silence. Amina pincers the edge of the table between her thumb and index and leans forward. “Suppose I believe you for a moment. Suppose there is a ticking hourglass and I find it and bring it to you. What do you plan to do with it?”
He moves his head from left to right, his gaze fixed on Amina. He begins to tap a knuckle on the table. Fixed intervals, patient, ceaseless. Tap tap tap tap. His eyes shine, those friendly soft eyes. “You know I hear it ticking every night, even though I can’t see it? It misses me as much as I miss it.” His tongue flicks in and out. “I would listen to it. Every remaining moment of my life till they took me to the gallows. I would ask them to have it next to my body as the TV stations stream your masters mutilating me so the entire world can listen to my mother’s hourglass. It doesn’t tick for everyone, but there must be someone like me out there who can hear it, who will understand.”
Amina’s face is contorted with disgust.
“Who will know what it is like to be my one of my boys, to be me. My mother’s hourglass will draw them to their destiny, just as it drew me.”
“So you’d like someone to assume your mantle. A copycat.”
“I love the fact that you’re my frand in all this. My partner in getting this message out to the world. More people need to hear about the punishment this naked, guilty society doles out to kids like my boys.”
“If it were up to me, I would let you rot in prison forever. This debacle of a public execution”—she shakes her head—“you would have none of it.”
“I believe I told you I was at NCA? I’m an artist. Think of this as body art of a sort, and now you will stream”—he tap tap taps away—“the metamorphosis of my body, its disassembly to every corner of the planet. This cunt of a country—the whole world, really—will bear witness to its crimes toward us.”
Amina looks like she wants to say something, but our time is up.
As we leave, she says, “I can’t do this. I’m telling Nadeem Bhai to find someone else.”
“I don’t blame you—”
“His art? He raped and molested dozens of children, killed God knows how many street kids, and now he wants airtime? I won’t be a part of his games, his delusions.”
“You might want to think about this for a second. We’re the only official channel to be allowed to stream it. Public executions such as this can be deterrents—”
“Says who?” She points a finger at me. “All evidence points to the contrary. Anytime an asshole like him is turned into a TV celebrity, five more crawl out of the woodwork. It’s a never-ending cycle.”
This is true. Carefully I say, “It’s a public event. The filming will happen whether we do it or an onlooker does with his personal camera. Think about it for a second. Once we have it on tape, once we’ve had time to clean it up, add interviews with the parents and witnesses, we could have the docu-film of the decade. “
“The film of the century, the recording of a lifetime. Don’t you understand what we’re doing?” We’re past the police checkpoint at the main gate, and a cyclist, wheeling up the road, turns to watch us. He has a camouflage cap on his head. “The filthy permission we are giving to the world by putting something like this on tape?”
“Someone has to.”
She looks at me, startled. “He isn’t wrong, then, is he? We’re all complicit.” She runs a hand through her hair, knocks off her hijab, carelessly fixes it, stares at the cyclist who whirls left and pedals leisurely past us. “Where were we when he molested those boys? All these bloodthirsty, righteous mobs?”
A shiver runs through her, twisting her features, slumping her shoulders. It is as if the world has taken ahold of her, wrung out all that energy, that fervor. “All our filming,” she says at last, her voice low, “and capturing and streaming of this is a communal crime, a shared psychotic breakdown. We are shit, aren’t we. As a nation and as a species.” She turns and begins walking away from me. “And I hate this duplicity.”
I watch her stride down the street to her car. Behind me two guards in navy shirts, bulletproof vests, and khaki pants beckon to a motorcyclist without a helmet. Scaling the terraced rooftops on my left is a bare-chested boy who runs with a kite string in hand, the huge patang following him like a predator in the heights. The evening sun has bloodied the horizon. Limned in red, the boy and his patang glow, then sink
and vanish behind a jagged brick wall.
I get on my bike and set off for the villa in Shahdara.
* * *
For a long time now I’ve despised the stories of Alif Laila Wa Laila.
Likely I never developed a taste for fairy tales, such fabular stories of The Thousand and One Nights. Perhaps I have realized that the worst thing about them is not the lie they tell us about ourselves but the heedless workmanship, the fragility of the lie. One scratch and you find the real story secreted in the belly of the false.
I find such callousness distasteful and arrogant.
The embryonic truth of one tale (told otherwise for centuries) goes like this:
Once upon a time a fisher boy cast his dragnet into the ocean. Up came seaweed and limpets, short dresses and long hair. Disgusted, he flung them and cast his net again. This time he netted a pale girl face and a wool chador that assumed the shape of things he didn’t like. Angry, he ripped the chador and bloodied the face with fishhooks. Back in they went.
He threw his net a third time, for three is also a magic number, and up came gurgling a dozen golden tokens, a weighing scale, and an antique hourglass with brass bases that twinkled in the sun.
Squinting, the fisher boy picked up this last, freed it from the net, turned it upside down. A sandy substance, not quite the color of tar, began to trickle the opposite way. The boy shook the hourglass back and forth, rubbed the verdigris on its bottom.
The sandy substance ceased its ceaseless fall. A shadow fell over the hourglass.
Final Cuts Page 28