Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

But I saw three of the five bodies clearly.

  FIVE minutes passed, then ten, fifteen, sixteen and seventeen, no more bodies rained. It had been a drizzle and the drizzle had now stopped. I did call to the Fruitseller, ‘Did you see that?’ I gestured to the charred child, Fruitseller looked once, smiled at me, and then continued waving the flies off the bananas.

  Had he not seen it? Could he not see it? Was I the only one who could see the bodies?

  I wanted to rush back to the safety of my house, lock the doors and windows, look through the slats for the scene outside to shift, for the first signs of the crowd noticing, for more men and women to gather, wait for the safety of numbers.

  I was frightened both for myself and for Ithim because what did this portend, this happening right in front of my eyes? Whose bodies were these, where had they come from and why had they fallen, as if from the sky? Why did they all bear marks of murder, of killing? Who were these victims, who were the culprits, were there more wherever they came from? Were they linked to the fires that I had not seen for myself but had heard about? And why wasn’t a single person on the street noticing the bodies were right there in the middle, in the way of the traffic?

  Eventually, though, it was this, the very fact that no one else had noticed these bodies, that began to quieten down my own fear. I was too tired and maybe I was seeing things, I thought.

  I found myself crossing the street, past the charred child, past the hunched woman, to the cybercafe. A welcome wave of relief swept over me when I saw the shutter had been rolled up; the glass door was closed but through it I could see the light glowing. Yes, I could check my message from Miss Glass.

  At the same time, there was Ithim.

  All along, he had been quiet in the bag, not even moving. (Or if he had, I hadn’t felt anything.) I lowered my right hand into the bag, gently brushed my fingers around his head, I touched one finger against his eyes, I could feel him blink. He was awake. Through the fabric of the bag, the dappled light of the morning that filtered in, had he seen what I had seen? Certainly not, how could he? And even if he had, he would surely not be able to make sense of what he saw. I hoped that at Holy Angel, while I went to the recovery room to see my wife, the nurses would take care of Ithim, clean him up, medicate, feed, check, fortify him so that he would be ready for the journey.

  Obviously, I wasn’t going to tell them I was taking Ithim on a train. You can’t do that, I was sure they would say, since when have you heard of any newborn – and one too who needs all the help he can get, one who has arrived in the world, with all the odds and evens stacked against him – being taken away from his mother when he’s not even a day old, put in a bag, howsoever gently or tenderly, have you heard of such a baby being taken on a train journey?

  ‘He will not survive it,’ that would be the Holy Angel’s verdict, ‘you cannot take him, it’s like taking him to his death. It’s a crime. Are you out of your mind? Mr Jay, what do you think you are doing? Here, please sign the consent form, the release form, some form or the other. He is in no shape to board a train today. What will you feed him? What about infections? The shudders, the jolts, the cold air?’

  To which I would have said: ‘He’s my child. Bring out any piece of paper you need me to sign because I am taking him this afternoon. I want to set him right.’ Well, if it came down to it.

  I pulled the cybercafe’s glass door open and stepped inside. It was empty but all the terminals were switched on, they glowed blue and green. I saw the back of Mr Meeko’s head as he sat at his own terminal, keying in something.

  I am Fruitseller, I was twenty-seven years old, I was born in Gaya in Bihar, I had a wife and four children, I lived in the slum under the bridge, my father was also a fruitseller but I started off making bidis in a godown for almost two years, I worked from 9 am to 8 pm with a lunch break at 1 pm but I got tired sitting in a closed room the whole day on the floor, cross-legged, and working only with my hands because I like walking, I like being in the open so I left that job, pushed a handcart for six months, ferrying supplies to and from a furniture shop but when I got married and the children came, my father said I needed something more steady and one morning he said he was very tired and could I take the fruitbasket out that day, I liked it, moving from one neighbourhood to the other, setting up shop on the pavement, and although the income wasn’t steady, day by day, I got to know most of the roads and the lanes until realized that I could remember places just after one visit, I could recall landmarks big and small, like a garbage heap, a broken lamp post, in fact if I were alive, I would eventually have become an auto-rickshaw driver, I know one in the neighbourhood and he makes good money but then came the mob, I remember that all of us were at home, sitting on the floor, in a circle, we had locked the door and the window, we heard them outside, it was afternoon, I hadn’t gone out that day because the schoolteacher who lived with us in the slum, he is the only one who reads a newspaper, had gone around telling everybody to be careful since after the train attack there was fear that we would be targeted, so I wanted to be at home in case something happened but I could do little when the mob set our house on fire, I opened a window to let the air come in but instead there was more smoke and more fire, I thought the fire couldn’t be so strong it would take all seven of us but it did, I was the last one to go, am not going to describe to you how my wife and children died, I cannot describe that, all I can say is that I was the last one to go, I have a brother who is still in Gaya, once a month I would call him from the phone booth near the police station but I am sure he will hear what happened here, he won’t wait for the call, he will take the next train to come and look for all of us, there must be some people in our slum who got away, they will watch as he searches for us, as he looks at our house, they will then tell him what happened to all of us, he will then go back and will never have to visit this city.

  9. Mr Saxel Meeko, My Only Friend

  JUST in case you accuse me of letting emotion cloud my reason, I need to come clean, I need to tell you that when I talk about a man called Saxel Meeko, you will detect in my voice a tone of admiration, maybe even some adulation. Allow me this temporary indulgence, for Mr Meeko is a friend – you will soon see why, and, if I may be so bold as to suggest, I think you will like him, too – and therefore it was only appropriate that I take Ithim inside, that he get to see the man, the one man his father admires in this city.

  That the cybercafe was empty when I walked in came as little surprise because its main business is at night, in the last hour before midnight. It’s then, Mr Meeko knows, that the women in his neighbourhood, wives daughters, mothers aunts, have cleared the dining tables, are preparing to sleep, some combing their hair, all assured in their assumption that their men, who have worked hard the whole day, need to take a walk, work off their stress, meet other men, discuss the day and its end.

  It’s then that Mr Meeko knows they will come.

  The men walk into his cybercafe, put the money on his desk, fifty rupees an hour for broadband, including tissue paper and a glass of Coke or Pepsi. No stuttering dial-up. Instead, welcome to Uninterrupted Access, Streaming Audio Video. To watch porn. Almost always, white. Once in a while, inter-racial, black on white, Asian, white on yellow, Indian, brown on brown, mix and match, keep the raw material the same, please. That’s what matters, the rest is just detail. As long as no one’s looking over your shoulder.

  Which, Mr Meeko, as a professional, has worked hard to ensure.

  So even when Internet costs have crashed, even these days when they offer PCs at slash-down prices, he knows they will come because these are images and sounds best seen and heard alone or in the company of strangers. Trisha, Jemma, Angie, Sylvia, undressing and moving, oceans and continents away, only for these men at this time in this city.

  Therefore, Mr Meeko has carefully designed his fourteen cubicles for privacy, with a partition between each, a glass slab double-plated to muffle noise. And a pair of headphones. The customers, too, are discreet.
Careful of what they do. Mindful of each other as they work on their coming, the boxes of tissue paper close at hand. Once in a while Mr Meeko gets up to walk around, unobtrusively, quietly, in bare feet, so his customers don’t even know he’s there. (He does that ever since the night he saw a customer masturbating to what looked like a naked child on the screen, barely three or four years old. It had filled him more with dread than revulsion, a fear he couldn’t place and he had to assure himself over and over again that this was no reason to close down his business and as long as he laid down the ground rules – in fact only one ground rule, no children, please – things would be fine. But rather than put that rule on paper or tell his customers about it – Mr Meeko never talks to them, even to make polite conversation – at least once a night, he gets up, on the pretext of going to the bathroom or drinking a glass of water, and walks between the cubicles. Like a schoolteacher supervising a class test, walking in and out of the rows and columns of chairs and tables to ensure that no one’s cheating.)

  Sure, there are laws, the Indian Information Technology Act 2000, under which his business at night (child or no child on the screen) is illegal; his cybercafe should be closed down. But Mr Meeko is practical and The Practical Mr Meeko has found a way out: a monthly payoff of five thousand and one rupees to the station house officer of the local police station, a man called Rakesh Sharma (the same name as the country’s first astronaut who went into space with the Russians). And Sharma gets three hours of free surfing every week. And surfing not on a terminal in one of the cubicles but on Mr Meeko’s terminal, the best of them all: a 17-inch Samsung screen, an optical i-ball mouse that glows in the dark, red beneath its surface, an ergonomic keyboard from the black market, split in the middle, so the wrist doesn’t strain. Specially padded earphones, too, so that Mr Sharma can listen to the audio as he comes to the video without hurting his ears, walk away after wiping himself with a paper towel and dropping it onto the floor.

  It’s tough. It makes Mr Meeko grit his teeth, the crumpled balls of tissue paper, stained with the semen of these men, but he slips on rubber gloves to clean up, putting each ball into a plastic bag which he then takes out, at the end of every night, and sets ablaze near the drain.

  It helps him feel clean, purified.

  HOW do I know all this? Well, trust me, I know. I have to admit I cannot vouch for the veracity of each detail but my information is based on several conversations with Mr Meeko. We have talked about work, his and mine, about the cybercafe, the neighbourhood, the city, the world – more so when my wife was pregnant and we began using his services regularly, at least twice or thrice every week. (It was during one of those meetings that he first showed me the webcam mounted outside his cybercafe looking down on the street below, permanent and unchanging, except for one click every hour, when it captures the scene in its rectangular frame and relays the image to Mr Meeko’s desktop. He would sit and watch, right through the day and night, the angle of the shadow change on the street, the ripples in the stagnant water in the drain caused by the vibration of a passing truck. Someone dropping a cigarette butt, a shred of paper caught in a sudden wind, a pair of feet passing by, all these, on his screen, imbued with a sense of the majestic and the wondrous.

  But if this was Mr Meeko’s unique virtual window to the world, he has a unique real window, too, in the basement where he lived, just below the cybercafe. So unusually positioned is this window that it serves as a peephole to the street outside, a vantage point through which Mr Meeko can see without being seen. He sits in the chair and watches feet passing him by. Once in a while, he will see a face, and that too, just a glance when someone on the street outside bends down. To tie his or her shoelaces or pick up something they have dropped.

  From the outside, if you stand on the street, even if you bend down, so unobtrusive is the window, covered by a brick ledge that juts out of the wall, you won’t remotely suspect someone could be watching you.)

  SUCH is Mr Saxel Meeko. As I said earlier, forgive my excitement, my awe, but I see in him a combination of the practical and the ideal that live, in most of us, only in opposition but in him have merged so effortlessly and gracefully. Here is a man who has cut himself off from this city but at the same time is watching it every waking moment. And, watching, not as we do, with our eyes always moving on, but by securing an extra pair of eyes and directing their gaze at something no one looks at, a tiny patch of pavement. And by not sharing it with others – as so many people do on the Net these days – he has added a permanent exclusivity to it that makes it more special, unique. And then the fact that he lives in the basement.

  Once again unseen, unheard, below the surface, plumbing the depths and like his webcam giving him a vantage point that no one else in this city has. Both webcam and basement keep him indissolubly tied to the city, the pavement above and the ground underneath, and yet both give him a sense of immeasurable distance, of living his life in a space and a time that are his own. Perhaps that’s where he gets his strength from, the grit to pick up the balls of crumpled tissue, stained with semen every night, then burn it outside on the pavement. Also he knows his power, that he holds all the strings in his hand, that he is the one who gets men to walk into his cybercafe every night and strike pitiful, sorry figures, their penises in their hands, their squirt and their groans.

  In a way, I sensed this the first time he introduced himself to me, in his formal, odd manner of speaking. ‘Myself, Mr Saxel Meeko.’

  ‘Yes, I saw,’ I said, pointing out to the printout on the wall where he had typed out his name in different fonts.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked, because of a name like that in a city like this, because his face gave nothing away, so ordinary and nondescript it was, with not one feature, neither hair nor eyes, or colour of skin, or weight to single him out from anyone else in this city – or this country, for that matter.

  ‘I am from a family. Just like you, just like all,’ he said, smiling, and then pulled me closer, taking me aback with this sudden, disquieting physical contact. ‘Mr Jay, in this city, Saxel Meeko is the best name. Safest name, they will never be able to guess who I am.’

  Now you know why I felt so comfortable that morning when I opened the door to his cybercafe and walked in. Because if there was any place that seemed safe, that seemed like a haven after the bodies falling from the sky, from my fears about the journey ahead, it was this.

  Mr Meeko, however, didn’t notice me as I entered the cubicle in the farthest corner to check if Miss Glass had sent her message.

  I am Body 3, I was five years old, that is what my mother told me, I want to go to my mother, it was very hot, there was fire, I want to go to my mother.

  10. One Message, Three Names

  SO odd was Miss Glass’s message that whatever idea I had of her until then, beginning with The Face by the window, the strands of hair on her forehead, the strap of her nightdress, her writing on the glass, the picture in her room and now in my pocket, followed by her phone call at night, her confidence and her arrogance, her form in my dream, the red sweater, the strip of pink skin above her waist, her nose ring, the tapping of her feet, all were put to the test as if they were bricks I had placed one on top of the other, one next to the other, to build an edifice called Miss Glass, I then saw them crumbling, falling to the ground, raising dust when I first opened my mailbox and saw:

  Sender: Miss Glass, the Subject line: Our Conversation.

  From: Miss Glass

  Reply to: ‘Miss Glass’

  To: Mr Jay, Husband of Patient No 110742

  Subject: Our Conversation

  At the railway station,

  As we discussed last night,

  Meet at five in the evening,

  We will set the baby right.

  Don’t worry about a thing,

  I will remain by your side,

  Yours loving Miss Glass,

  She who knows where to hide.

  And in case you don’t see me

&nbs
p; In the maddening crowd,

  There will be someone there

  To call out, clear and loud.

  SO, that was the message? These were the ‘detailed instructions’ she said she would send me, to prepare us for the journey?

  Rage.

  My first reaction was rage.

  What did she take me to be, a wooden duck, a cardboard train being pulled along at the end of a string?

  What did all of this add up to? Was this someone pulling a fast one? Was Miss Glass a fraud? Someone who had seen me at the hospital, who may have known someone working there, some nurse, some guard, some doctor, maybe Head Nurse, and had bribed someone (just as I had bribed Old Bird) to get my details, my number, my wife’s condition, details about my Ithim, and made a prank call last night? And then, put the phone on speaker mode, got friends to sit around, laughing at how gullible I was – and, yes, I did hear the sound of laughter on the phone last night, a sound that Miss Glass had dismissed straight away, brushed aside – so, at this moment, they were slapping each other on the back, as they imagined this scene, of a man made a fool of, his baby by his side. Early in the morning, in a city on fire, sitting in a cybercafe, the first customer, reading junk?

  No, it couldn’t be. How could it be?

  Because one thing I was sure of: I had seen the woman by that window, I had seen her write those two words on the glass. I had picked up a picture from that room and Miss Glass had referred to it in our conversation. Also, to be fair, yes, I had detected arrogance, confidence, an unusual familiarity in Miss Glass’s tone, but no, I hadn’t heard a single false note in whatever she had told me last night. But then why had she done this, sent me a message that was of no help at all? When she knew I had taken, solely at her insistence, a leap in the dark. When I had put Ithim in a bag – while he should have been in a bed in the hospital under expert medical care or pressed to his mother’s breasts, feeling their rise and fall – and set out on a journey she had promised to map out, to lead, to guide.