So how do I say this without straining credibility? Well, I will do two things. One, I will tell it like it is, and two, I will describe everything else in a fashion, absolutely matter of fact, just like I did with Ithim in the beginning, switching off the adjectival lights, using terms cold and clinical, black and white.
It rained corpses that morning.
For a full five minutes.
I checked my watch, I saw, I heard.
Yes, bodies fell from the sky.
But we will come to that in a short while because I need to begin with Ithim and me stepping out of our house. The child fed, cleaned, safe in the bag slung across my shoulder, in the first light of day. That’s when we saw the fires. Not fires exactly but I saw what the flames had left behind, the remainders and the reminders of the night gone by.
I had missed them in the dark when I had brought Ithim home from the hospital in the taxi but I saw them now on either side of our street, I saw them now in the row of shops, tightly squeezed against each other: black rectangles, gaping hollows, their edges twisted and bent.
Three such holes I could make out, without much effort: Ahmed Meat Shop; Rehman, the tailor’s; and the shoe store. The rest – the majority – of the shops were closed, shutters down, untouched. Streaked with dew, not with fire, guarded by a police van, blue and white. Two policemen sat in the front seat, their legs propped up on the dashboard beneath the misted windscreen where the cold vapour met the warm glass. There was nothing for them to police, maybe that’s why they were fast asleep.
I wanted to walk right up to one of those holes and look inside, see what had been burnt and what had been left behind but there was no wasting time. Ithim and I had to go to the hospital, check in on my wife, wait there for a while, for Head Nurse to look at him. And then we had to, as Miss Glass had said, head for the railway station. Before that, of course, I needed to stop by at Mr Meeko’s cybercafe to check the email Miss Glass had said she would send. With ‘detailed instructions’, that was the phrase she had used.
But this was Ithim’s first day out and the only way I can do justice to that occasion is to mark the route we took.
In fact, I have a diagram to show you, a simple line diagram in black and white with no room for grey. Our L-shaped route, starting from the steps that lead from my apartment building to the pavement. Ending with our destination, the bus stop on the other side.
For me, the father, a short walk on the surface of this city, a walk I have taken a million times, but for my son that morning, almost a trip to the moon. I have put it down on paper for another reason, self-serving though it may sound. To impress upon you that my recollection isn’t merely impressionistic, it’s based on facts. So that later, when I tell you about the bodies falling, you don’t brush it away as my momentary lapse of reason:
Fruitseller
He is among the first to come in every morning and set up his mobile shop on the pavement. That day, he had rigged up two wooden planks propped on upturned wicker baskets for his display cart. I see him every day when I go to work, he sells bananas, mostly. He supplements, complements, depending on the season. If it’s May and June, he keeps cucumbers which he peels and slits, uses the knife to pat some salt on the slices; if it’s after the rains, he has mangoes; if it’s winter, as that morning was, he has some apples and oranges, sometimes grapes, too. But bananas, every day of the year.
There are always flies on the bananas. Buzzing, flying in circles, triangles, straight lines, ellipses.
I like flies.
I like their whirring sound, their furry feel, their tickle when they come to rest on my arm. I become still, I watch them delicately probe the surface of my skin, I like their frail, tender movements as they wash their legs. (Once my wife killed a fly and I looked at it for hours through an old magnifying glass. It lay on the windowsill, drenched in the heat of the afternoon sun, its legs, crumpled and tucked in, its tiny chest distended, perhaps the last of its breath still trapped inside, waiting to exit along with its soul, its eyes glassy and grey as if it had cried in fear, trembled and quivered in the last moments before it was killed. That was a pity because I like playing with them, swatting them away, not hard but enough to scare them for a moment. Most of all, I like watching them dare me.
These little creatures, not one bit afraid of me, of someone more than a hundred times their size, or is it five hundred or is it a thousand? We need to calculate, come up with, of course, an estimate. Let me do a simple exercise, if only for Ithim. If Ithim is one day able to hear, to understand, this is how I shall explain it to him: the courage of the flies.
If I am covered with flies from head to toe, my entire body, my fingers, my nails, in between the ridges of my elbows, behind my knees, on my anklebones, in every twist and turn, in my armpits, in between the toes, how many flies would that be? I am about five feet ten inches; if you approximate me as a cylinder, my area is two multiplied by π multiplied by my radius – which given my waist size of 31 will approximate 10 inches – multiplied by my height which works out to roughly seventy inches so the surface area works out to about 4544.8 something square inches and if you divide that by the area covered by one fly resting on my body, which will be roughly about point zero three square inches assuming an average fly is a quarter of an inch long and about half as wide, it works out to 150,000 flies. So, there you have it, it’s amazing, the fly isn’t scared of me. Me, who is about one hundred and fifty thousand times its size. Show me a man with that kind of courage.)
That’s why I stopped at the Fruitseller that morning, that’s why I adjusted Ithim in the bag – there was no way I would bring him out – so his eyes faced the flies, so he could watch through the fabric of the bag.
A father wants to share things with his son.
Manhole Man
Not more than ten steps away from Fruitseller, I saw the manhole cover of the drain. A thick circular plate made of iron, the colour of cement and concrete, ash and black and grey, a number engraved on its surface (the number the Corporation gives to each manhole in the city, as an identifier). That morning, the cover was placed on the street, in such a way that half of it was on the pavement, the other half in the drain, the edge of the cover in a pool of black water. We walked close to the manhole, Ithim and I, and there he was, Manhole Man.
Just his head, shiny black hair, not a single grey fleck, no, never – since they only use young men to do this job – his head rose out of the manhole. Like a swimmer emerging from a pool to catch his breath, to acknowledge the applause. I saw his bare torso, his legs bare, his feet bare, a small red towel wrapped around his waist to cover his nakedness. He climbed out, black sewage sticking to his body as if he had come to the surface from inside the shaft of a mine and coal dust from its walls had rubbed off on his skin.
In one of his hands, there was a bucket, made of aluminium, a small bucket, the kind I have in the bathroom to store water. This bucket was full of wet sewage, overflowing, so much so that it had formed a tiny black hill on top, the sewage water, brown, muddy, flowing down the side of its walls.
Still half inside, I saw Manhole Man place the bucket out on the street and then pull himself out, using his two free hands to lever himself up. Once he was out, he retrieved the bucket, walked to the drain where he emptied it. He must have started early on in the day, since at the edge of the drain, where he tipped the bucket, there was already a little hillock of black sewage.
Looking at Manhole Man, the dream I’d had that night, of the cricket ball and Ithim in the drain, carried along by the current of sewage, suddenly seemed to appear softer, less threatening. The open cover of the manhole, the first light of day, the calmness, the grace with which Manhole Man was going about his job, made me think of that swim in the dream tunnel, of the river meeting the sea and the ocean, merging with water from across the world, waves from the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea heading for the Atlantic thousands of miles to one side and the Australian coast thousands of miles to the o
ther. (One day, I will go there with Ithim, maybe on board a ship; we will take a room with portholes through which he can see the water. At night, I will take him to the deck, remove the covering over his eyes and hold him face upwards, so he can see the stars and the moon. Then I will tilt him gently, show him how they reflect in the waves.
A father has dreams for his son.)
Street Divider
Past Fruitseller and his bananas, past the flies, past Manhole Man, the growing hillock of sewage, Ithim and I began to cross the street. Midway we stopped at the divider. The divider is, in essence, a long cement garden, a narrow rectangular strip that bisects the street, about four feet wide and a few inches above street level, running as far as your eyes can see on either side.
It was recently constructed, part of the city’s plan to widen this road. Grass was planted there in the first week of June to mark Earth Day. (My wife, newly pregnant, and I stood in the balcony and watched the day’s ceremonies. Boys and girls, men and women had reached here early morning, in shorts and trousers and white T-shirts with caps saying Save the Earth. The state Minister for Forests and Environment was the Chief Guest. A bureaucrat, dressed in a suit and tie, did the digging with a shovel, planted a sapling and the Minister poured water.
My wife said she would use that plant as a marker for the growth of our own child. However, in the six months since that morning, my wife swelled but the sapling died, the grass grew only in patches.)
The divider has a railing on either side to prevent pedestrians from jaywalking but the railing is broken in several places, some through neglect, some by intention, so it’s stopped serving the purpose for which it was set up. While crossing the road, you can squeeze yourself through one of the gaps, step onto the grassy patch on the divider. This is used as a pit stop by many people. A temporary resting place.
Which is what we, Ithim and I, did that morning. We crossed one half of the street and then waited at the divider. We saw the posters up close, posters on billboards attached to the street lamps that sprout from the divider like tall trees planted at regular intervals. That morning, all the billboards on the divider were taken up by a cellphone company advertising its special roaming service across the country.
The ad featured a dog following a boy wherever he goes, the dog, a little pug, obviously standing in for cellular signals and the boy, about seven or eight years old. (I have seen the ad on TV as well.)
Boy and dog running across an empty field, low-lying hills as the backdrop, boy always in front, dog behind.
Boy and dog running along a train track, trees on either side.
Boy at his study desk, perhaps doing his homework, dog sitting at his feet, its ears flopped down, one eye closed.
Boy in a marble bathtub, his little head propped up on the rim, dog on the floor, its head between its two front paws.
And so on. Boy and dog, always together. Like Ithim and I.
A father and son, never to be separated.
Insurance House
Once we had stepped off the divider and crossed the street, we were at the tip of the vertical rule of the L, just where the bend begins for the walk to the bus stop. Ahead was Insurance House, the new office building that sells life insurance and pension plans to this city. Walls made of red sandstone and its windows made of thick stained glass, it’s a new building completely out of place in our neighbourhood. In fact, one side, the building’s wall, is entirely formed of glass. Black, shining and opaque. I like looking at this glass facade not only because of how it catches the glint of the sunshine during the day, the bounce of the yellow neons at night, the huge poster of a happy, insured family (father, mother, son and daughter, all sitting on a wooden floor, watching TV, a golden retriever in the middle), but also because of how the glass distorts my reflection, so I become almost ten or twelve feet tall, my face more than two feet long. The glass widens my forehead, stretches the chin below the lips so much that even I can’t recognize myself, my legs become almost as long as the lamp post on the divider.
That morning, with Ithim, I was tempted to take him out of the bag, remove the towel that wrapped him, and see what he looked like in that glass. Because he was deformed, I wanted to see how he would look de-deformed and magnified, would the glass, by some freak of optics, give him some semblance of the normal? Of course, I did no such thing; and, instead, headed for the cybercafe to check Miss Glass’s email.
That’s when the bodies rained.
IT began with a sound of something falling, something large and heavy, the sound dull, deadweight. In the shuffle of feet, in the noise of vehicle horns, and brakes, sudden and slow, the clink of the bucket of the Manhole Man and the creak of a wooden door opening somewhere, closing somewhere else, Fruitseller shouting at the flies, a radio blaring an old song, scratchy and loud, this specific sound would have gone unheard. But that morning, it seemed, just for the very moment when it happened, silence had stretched taut, tight across the entire block. And this sound had neatly punctured it, torn it open.
So loud it was.
It came from across the street, that I was sure of, and from near the burnt butcher’s shop, but when I looked, I saw nothing. Maybe, I thought, it had come from the shop itself, some overhanging beam that had been charred to its foundation and suddenly fallen off, its joints coming unhinged a fraction of an inch every hour or so until its entire weight had given way.
And then there was the second sound.
In the space of a few minutes. And this was closer; it seemed to be coming from right behind me. So close, in fact, that it made me jump. When I turned to look, it wasn’t actually that close – it was well beyond the bus stop – but this time I could see the source of the noise. On the same side of the street that I stood on, it lay half sprawled over the pavement, half on the drain.
It was a body.
Maybe it had been lying on the roof of the shop nearest to us, had rolled off, pulled by gravity down the incline of the asbestos roofing. It was a man’s body, neither tall nor short, a head of thinning grey hair, dressed in a white shirt now smudged in several places, grey and brown and grey trousers that had slipped from the waist revealing a bit of his stomach. He wore a red half-sleeved sweater, frayed at the V-neck. Both his feet were bare, one leg flung over the other as if he had been sitting in a chair with his legs crossed when he had died, and then rigor mortis had set in locking the legs in that position when he fell. His neck twisted, I couldn’t see his face clearly, just the back of his head, the stab wound in his chest that had drenched his shirt with blood that had by now dried to a crust so hard it didn’t even look like blood, just thick brown paint. On his left wrist, I saw a pale white band on the brown skin. Perhaps that marked out where his watch should have been.
And then it struck me, how no one had noticed this except me; how people were walking past the body as if it were a discarded bag or a pile of clothes. Certainly, I could have walked up to him, could have turned him over, or just circled around him to see, Ithim pressed to my side in the bag. But before I could think anything of this, another body fell.
This time, it landed across the street from me, a few feet in front of the manhole. This body was different, it was black in colour, so black that it didn’t even seem human. And small, just about the size of both my palms, cupped. Once my eyes had adjusted, once the thud had died into silence again, I could clearly make out its limbs, all four of them, tiny, like four little fingers pointing upwards. I walked across to the divider to have a better look and only then did I realize it was a body all right, but it seemed to be the body of a baby – a boy or girl I had no idea – and it was charred. So intense the fire was, I guessed, that the entire body had warped and twisted, its limbs pointed to the sky. Like this was no child but a calf-puppet milkmen make, of sticks and cowhide and thatch, colour it black, to fool the cow into lactating, a black cow that has lost her baby.
In the next minute or so, other bodies fell, all within my field of view, marking out – almo
st – the circumference of a circle where I was the centre. As if someone invisible were hovering right above me, someone as big as the sky, draped over the entire neighbourhood, sealing all the cracks in and between buildings, filling all the empty spaces. And this someone was dropping these bodies. (For me to see, for Ithim to see. I reached inside the bag and pulled the edge of the towel across to cover Ithim’s eyes; I felt his eyelashes close against the back of my palm. He couldn’t see, he wouldn’t see, that I was now sure of.)
I heard the bodies fall, the bones snap, I heard the crunch, even the sound of dead flesh hitting the cement, concrete, I heard the light wind that had begun to blow, adding to the morning chill, the rustle of the clothes the bodies wore as they caught this wind. And when I turned and walked to the bus stop, the body of the old man was still there and the charred child was in front but there was also a woman now, dressed in a blue sari hitched to her knees, her legs splayed, her hair loose, black and dry, falling to her waist. She lay on the divider, her torso hunched, as if she were sitting against the wire cage around a sapling, her head twisted at an impossible angle. Her left earring had been wrenched from her earlobe and blood had crusted there, the skin sliced as if her ears were made of paper or rubber, easily torn and shredded. There was dirt in her toenails polished red; I counted and there were four nails where the polish had chipped leaving behind just a hint of colour.
The last two bodies were far away, almost where the street seemed to end and from where the bus would emerge any moment now so I couldn’t make out who they were, I just saw dark, hulking shapes, two bundles, one on either side, one curled up, thicker and smaller, the other sprawled so distant that the only part of it I could see was an arm, outstretched.
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