Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  And yet at the same time, I felt – how do I say it – I felt protective.

  For, sitting in that imaginary chair at that imaginary table, her face turned away from me, perhaps it was her thin frame or her slender wrists and fingers, but there was no mistaking her vulnerability. Or maybe the whole time I was looking at her, that scene from the hospital earlier that afternoon was playing in some part of my head: her writing on the glass, the two words HELP ME, before the lights switched off in her room. Followed by the manner in which she kept avoiding that in her conversation on the phone, betraying at some level a desperate need to put up a brave face, hide her weakness.

  Whatever, I kept waiting for the Imagined Miss Glass, the Just Conjured Miss Glass to get up from the chair, give me a fuller view of herself, maybe walk over to me, even have a second conversation, this time face to virtual face, answer the questions I had not yet asked. But instead, she faded away as the light inside my eyes dimmed and darkened, my lids grew leaden and heavy dragging me down to the depths where other dreams lay in wait.

  This, initially, seems more like a memory than a dream.

  I am a child playing cricket in the apartment building I grew up in. The expensive bat we are playing with belongs to the kid whose father exports steel rods used in construction. We play with a rubber ball, the agreement being that the kid who owns the bat doesn’t have to buy the ball – ever. Others have to take turns: it costs half a rupee. We lose a ball at least once a week, to either the traffic on the street or the toilet at the end of the passageway.

  It’s my turn today. So I pray extra hard that the ball doesn’t get hit onto the street, run over under the wheels of a bus or a tram because Father says he can’t afford half a rupee for a cricket ball if I have to buy one every month. ‘I am not a businessman selling steel rods,’ he says, ‘I am a schoolteacher. I can pay only once every two months for a cricket ball. Tell me if there is a book you need and I will get it for you but not a ball.’ How do I tell him that under the wheels of the traffic on the street there isn’t much room for his logic, that his probity is almost brutal.

  The toilet, I can handle.

  It’s a ‘public-service’ toilet, with no doors, just a shoulder-high wall for privacy, a tap that’s usually out of order and a bucket that’s almost never used. At least twice, during a game, the ball takes the top-edge, gets deflected, bounces off the wall, finds its way into the toilet. Into the sludge of piss and shit of countless strangers. As it does today.

  The stench I cannot smell since I am holding my breath. I bend down, use my left hand to reach out for the ball and just when I am only a few inches and seconds away from it, an arm shoots up from within the toilet bowl, grabs me, pulls me down. Whose arm is it I do not know.

  I scream.

  But because I am holding my breath, the noise is muffled. I am now inside the toilet bowl, all my four feet ten inches or so fitting magically into that confined space that is the hole, the shit entering my eyes, my ears, my mouth. Bitter, sour and sweet. I retch a greenish fluid, remnants of the late lunch I had when I returned from school, and it mixes with the sludge around me, I am pulled deeper and deeper down. I see bubbles forming near my nose, in rapid succession, as the trapped air rushes forth. And although I should not be able to see anything since the filth has entered my eyes, I can see clearly.

  I am now inside a giant tunnel, swimming with the tide of the sewage, being carried along like a paper boat in the flood, and all this while the ball is a couple of inches in front of me, racing ahead. I lunge forward to reach it but it’s moving faster than I am. As if it has a life of its own, mocking me as it darts, swings, curves, pirouettes. Sometimes it brushes against my outstretched fingers, teasing; at other times, it moves so quickly, almost leaping, bouncing so far ahead I can only see it as a distant speck in the onrushing waste, thick and heavy, foetid and fierce.

  Through the tunnel’s ceiling barely inches above my head, I can hear the traffic, the rumble, the whine, of wheels and feet. The loud hum and chatter of my friends, calling out to me to hurry up, the light is failing and the innings isn’t over yet, the game has to be completed this evening, someone has to win and someone has to lose.

  The sewage has entered my mouth, caked my tongue, I spit it out but it keeps entering so fast that my breathing can’t keep pace. I can hear the boys shouting, every nerve, every muscle in my body aches as I am buffeted by the slurry, increasingly viscous, dragging me behind one time, pushing me forward at another, increasing the distance between me and the ball with every passing second.

  Then, almost as suddenly as it all started, I see the ball slow down, closer to my grasp.

  But it’s not a ball any more. It’s a different size now, it grows as I look at it, not radially, but in length. With each stroke of my arm as I move towards it, fighting for every breath, the ball gets bigger and bigger, slower and slower, and by the time I reach it, it’s almost like a little tube, made of rubber, a slight circular bulge at one end reminding me of the shape that it once was. Covered with the sludge, it’s also brown in colour and when my fingers brush against it, get a hold, some sort of a grasp, I know what I’m holding: this is no cricket ball, this is Ithim.

  I am screaming.

  Can Ithim survive this? This headlong fall, this onward rush? Can he swim through the filth, Ithim who has only eyes and neither arms nor legs to propel himself? I reach out to grab him and the moment my fingers touch Ithim, he turns over, and there they are again, looking at me, his perfect eyes, his perfect eyebrows and his eyelashes. Not one of them touched by this ordeal, they are as clean as when I first saw them.

  Ithim is now in my arms and we are both swimming; the water is crystal clear, like a mountain stream. We can see the night above, the ceiling of the tunnel has long gone, there are brightly coloured fish navigating us, guided by the gleam of the stars. When we reach the surface, there is a boat waiting for us, shaped like a taxi, its black frame and yellow canvas top, polished, sparkling in the night. Ithim and I get into it and the moment we are seated it takes off, noiselessly, without the usual rev and stutter, and within minutes, it has lifted above the surface of the water into the air and we are now flying over the city, Ithim and I.

  The wind whistles past us drying the water on our bodies. The sky is cloudless, the moon bright, and below us we can see the lights of the city, winking, returning my child’s blinks from above, as if the city and Ithim were communicating a coded message to each other. The boat steadily gains in altitude until we are so high that my head begins to reel. I close my eyes, I clasp Ithim closer to me, my hands on his face and my fingers can feel his eyelashes rustle, as if I have trapped a firefly in my palms in the dark.

  I am naked.

  And I am pregnant, with Ithim.

  I stand in the bathroom, looking in the mirror, and I can see Ithim inside me, the outline of his shape marking itself beneath my skin. His head by my chest, the entire length of his body running like a furrowed bulge, in one almost straight line, down to my navel, as if someone has inserted a tube into my throat, a tube made of rubber and blown air through one end. I try to cover this bulge by wearing a vest, a second vest, a striped shirt, a thick blue jacket, a windcheater, but it doesn’t go away. Instead, it grows and grows, pushing at my lungs and my heart, causing an excruciating pain that begins in my stomach and stretches up to my chest. I can feel Ithim’s eyes blinking inside me, so hard they make a noise that echoes my own heartbeat.

  My clothes get tighter, the buttons start to pop. I take them off, hurriedly. Ithim has begun to move.

  His head, so far just below my chest, is now pressing against my neck. His body has also moved higher up, my collarbones twist under his pressure, I can hear them crack, the muscles inside stretch, making a sound like a door creaking. Soon he may reach my mouth, push himself up my throat, claw at my tongue, my lips. And then I hear it, what I have been dreading all along: I hear the sound of something tearing, like fabric coming apart at its seams, no
t properly stitched.

  It’s my chest, it’s splitting open.

  Beginning right in the middle, halfway between my neck and my navel, just below my nipples, in one horizontal line, like a zip being unfastened. The skin is giving way to the pressure from within, I can see the outer layer peel away first, the epidermis, with the hair, the pink of the dermis, I can see my veins and arteries intertwined in the yellow-white fat and the tissue. Ithim’s head appears through this widening crack, the charred skin below his forehead and his eyes, his eyelashes and the eyebrows, all drenched with my blood. My chest is wide open now, the floor red with blood I have lost, but I feel neither any pain nor any weakness. Just a growing lightness, of pressure pent up being released, my breathing now faster, but certainly much easier.

  I look like a kangaroo, my chest a pouch formed by the two ends that have given way and which now frame Ithim’s head. He’s peering out, it seems, he’s blinking. I gently hold him, feel the bones inside his skull, just underneath his scalp move, twist and turn. I try to prise him out, he closes his eyes. I pull hard and my opened chest opens further, Ithim emerges, and with each centimetre of his body that I am able to extricate from my chest, blood flows, thick and fast, running all the way down my stomach, matting my hair, over the penis, before running down my legs, and then onto the floor. It collects in a pool near my ankles, it clots as the fibrinogen meets the cold winter air.

  Ithim is now out of my body, I place him on the counter of the bathroom sink, my blood dripping from his body, a huge red blotch on the white ceramic. I open the drawer in a small cupboard, my wife’s stitching set is there, the one I picked up from a hotel room. A small packet of translucent plastic in which lie a needle, two buttons, a safety pin, threads in three colours, white, black and sky blue, wound on three rectangular cardboard strips.

  And I grit my teeth, brace myself, start stitching my chest up. Each stitch is surprisingly painless and as soon as it’s done the thread changes colour, from white to the brown of my skin; it merges with the skin, becomes the skin itself. So much so that once the stitches are in place, strands of hair begin to sprout, almost instantaneously, covering the stitches so there’s nothing to show what happened except for a faint line across my chest and, of course, the blood on the floor. So much blood I wonder how we can ever mop all this up, wash it away without a flood, a deluge.

  WHEN I woke up, my entire body was aching, my shoulders were stiff, as were my neck and my legs. Both my feet, propped up on the bed next to Ithim, had gone to sleep and waiting for the blood to rush back so I could move them, I saw, in the shadows of the night that draped Ithim, that his cheeks were wet. So wet that the tears had even seeped into the bed sheet leaving two stains. Dark and tiny. He must have cried several times when I was asleep, he must have cried himself awake, he then must have cried himself back to sleep again. No noise, of course, to wake me up.

  I left the chair to walk to the bed, sit down next to Ithim. When I leaned close, my head just a few inches away from his, I could see his chest rise and fall.

  And I could smell.

  A stench from Ithim like thick smoke from a fire, black and noxious but invisible. It made my eyes smart and I had to hold my breath as it churned my insides, pushed the bile from last night into my mouth (because I hadn’t eaten anything for hours, only drunk a few glasses of water, the bile was bitter but weak, it didn’t burn my throat, just mixed with the taste of sleep and my dreams and scalded my tongue). Ithim had soiled himself.

  And because Head Nurse had only wrapped him in the towel, leaving the diapers to me, I knew I had to change him.

  It was back to the printouts.

  The thumb rule is that you have to always, always, make no mistake about it, you have to first clean your hands. And cleaning your hands means not wiping them in a towel but scrubbing them hard, the palms, the fingers, between the fingers, up to the wrists. Because the germs that your hands carry are worse than what live in a baby’s soiled bottom. Unwashed hands, with the germs still very much there, can damage the baby’s tender and sensitive skin. So, let me repeat, wash your hands thoroughly before you begin cleaning the baby up.

  Settle the baby down on a changing table, or any soft, warm, clean and dry area. You can even place your baby down on a blanketed floor. Peel off the old diaper or the wrapping but before you remove it completely, use one end of it to wipe out any of the excess pee or shit. If your baby is a boy, it’s a good idea to cover his penis with a clean piece of cloth. This way, while you are cleaning him up and he decides to go again, you need not get your face drenched by the sudden spray.

  Gently grasp the baby’s ankles together with one hand and lift his bottom off the table, floor or the plastic mat you may have draped on the bed. Use baby wipes or a soft, wet cloth to wipe the baby’s genitals.

  At this stage, some people apply baby talc to the bottom but you need to check with the doctor about what you are using. Baby powders are more or less safe but then given that your baby’s skin hasn’t had much contact with anything in the world except maybe his mother’s, it’s always a good idea to avoid any substance which has unnatural compounds and chemicals in it.

  I washed my hands, thoroughly, I peeled off the hospital towel and set to work, looking at Ithim, naked for the first time.

  The flesh-tube that lay in front of me on the bed just needed to be wiped gently, no complex movements of the arms and the legs, I only had to lift the flaps of skin that covered his penis and his anus. I used Head Nurse’s towel, drenched in the hospital’s antiseptic, to clean the mess Ithim had made. It was watery brown in colour with some scraps of white, maybe from the baby formula I had fed him hours ago. When I took the towel to the bathroom, dropped it below the sink, for a moment, in a flash, I could see the congealed blood on the floor of my dreams.

  My wife had bought diapers but when I brought one of them out it soon became clear it wouldn’t work, it was too large. So I used more tissue paper, rolling it out to prepare a pad, placed the pad over the anus, adjusted it so that the tiny penis flopped on it and then I put one of my wife’s sanitary napkins around it. The entire package now seemed to overwhelm him, a big bulk of white over the tiny, deformed brown – but Ithim looked clean and fresh, protected and safe. I fetched a fresh towel from his nursery, a towel my wife had bought, its price tag still stuck on, and wrapped Ithim again.

  The dreams I had just had, of retrieving Ithim from that tunnel of sludge, then flying over the city, of Ithim tearing me up, drenched in my blood, the physical exhaustion of the previous evening and the night, the endless questions that had assailed me about my child’s uncertain future, Miss Glass and her mystery phone call, perhaps all these had piled up, one on top of the other, adding to a crushing weight and the only way for me to relieve it was to get up and walk out of the room.

  And as if my feet were dragging me, fleeing in that primitive instinct of self-preservation, I found myself leaving Ithim asleep on the bed, walking away from him. Yes, I knew I had to feed him again before we set out, maybe clean him once more, wrap him up, make arrangements to carry him on the journey that Miss Glass had planned for us. But all that could wait.

  Right now, I needed to be alone, I needed space away from Ithim.

  I am Doctor 1, I was forty-four years old, I have a wife and three children, two sons, fifteen and thirteen, and a daughter, ten years old, both my sons were born in Oman where my wife and I lived for eight years, where I worked as an Emergency Room specialist, the salary and the benefits were very attractive, almost five times what make here, tax-free, so when we returned – because my wife said, let’s go back home, we have made enough money – I used my savings to buy an apartment in this city, a very well-constructed apartment, there was no damage to it during the earthquake although it’s on the sixth floor of a ten-storey building and many houses next to it were cracked in so many places that they had to be abandoned, we survived the quake and I would have survived the fire, too, had it not been for the driver of t
he van, they stopped him, they asked him who we were, what our names were, and he told them, if he had lied, if he had made up two Hindu names for us, they would have let us go, I doubt they would have forced two doctors in uniform to undress, Doctor 2 and Head Nurse were sitting next to me, Doctor 2 did try to open the van so we could get out but there were so many people pressing against the doors that it was impossible, maybe the van driver just got frightened and didn’t have the presence of mind to lie, anyway now it’s all over, my wife should sell the house and, with our children, leave the city, she has relatives in Dubai who are fairly well established, they are rich, one of them has a house near the Creek, I am sure they will all help her and the children, find a way out, maybe even get her a job, she has a BA degree in history, she used to take private tuition, she can do a BEd through correspondence and get a job as a teacher in the international school there, affiliated to the Delhi Board, the children then won’t have to pay any fees, they are doing very well in school, I never thought this would happen to me, usually those killed in such situations are the poor who live in slums and have no security, of all the patients I treated in this city almost ninety-nine per cent were Hindu but then these things don’t matter, a mob doesn’t think, you can’t argue with a thousand people at one time, in fact, Doctor 2, I remember, did tell them we had treated many injured people in the hospital, but that just made them more angry, one of them laughed and said, now we will send you to the hospital, don’t you worry, let’s see who takes care of you, they said, and then the flames slipped in through the window, I heard Head Nurse scream, her face the last thing I saw through the smoke, she trying to cover it with her shawl.