Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  Mother and son find comfort in the warm water in the night of a city on fire.

  ‘Did you watch?’ Mother asks Tariq.

  He can see her words hover in the air, near her lips, slide down her neck, curve left across her shoulder and then reach his ear, cold to the touch.

  Tariq shakes his head.

  ‘No,’ he says, his voice so low even he can’t hear.

  ‘Then let’s go,’ she says, ‘we have some work to do.’

  She gets up, wipes her hands on her sari and tells him to go wait outside, at the door. Once again, Tariq can see the cement divider, the boy and the dog in the poster, the street lights and the insects, the cars passing by.

  She is back with a can of kerosene in one hand and in the other, a bundle, the sari and the blouse, the clothes she wore when she was with A, B, C and D on the street.

  ‘Be careful,’ she says. ‘Don’t stand so close to me.’

  She sits on her haunches, her knees click, she lights a match, sets the bundle of her clothes on fire.

  The wind at this time is light so she bends her face forward and blows on the flames. (Like she did with the coal oven before they had a gas cylinder.) The fire begins to lick the ends of the sari. She then steps back and comes to where the boy is standing. She puts one hand on his head, wet, he can feel the water, still warm, getting warmer as the flames grow.

  They stand there for over half an hour, forty minutes, no one notices the small fire outside the house. They stand there until the flames are so high they cast shadows on the wall of the house.

  Funny shadows.

  In which Tariq looks like a giant, she double his size, her shoulders so wide it seems she could carry the whole neighbourhood. Even the entire city, if she wished to.

  And then when nothing is left, other than ash, bits and pieces of fabric, charred, when the nylon in her sari has left a tiny oil-like slick that streaks the pavement, a tendril of smoke coiling up, she says it is over.

  ‘That’s it,’ she says, ‘now go to sleep.’

  The son doesn’t sleep that night, he can’t sleep that night.

  Neither does she, that he is sure of.

  Because he hears her crying, he smells the smoke drifting in from outside, he hears her walk to the bathroom again, pour water over herself, twice, thrice, four times, come back to the bedroom and cry again.

  IT’S a few hours later. Unable to sleep, Tariq gets up, takes out his books from the schoolbag. There’s some homework to do, not due until a week’s time but he wants to do it now; he switches on the ceiling fan, hopes it will blow away the smoke from the balcony, clear the air. He lies on the floor, his face resting on both his wrists as he tries to read, the pencil kept in between the pages of his book, the pages that flap in the breeze from the fan. Once he gets up to stand at the window, pulls the curtain to one side and looks into the dark. Then he comes back, falls in and out of sleep until they return.

  They have come back before the city wakes up, before it washes its eyes, still crusted with broken sleep, its face, still smeared with the ash of last night.

  There are A, B, C and D, the ones who were there last night. But this time they are joined by E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q all the way to X, Y, Z and then again from A (keep reading out the alphabet, listing the letters one by one, five times, make it six, and you will still run out of letters, so many of them are there).

  But the same four are leading the mob, A, B, C and D. They know their way around. The rest wait outside on the street. With their torches and their mops soaked in kerosene, waiting to be lit.

  D is the one who gets to work this time.

  He breaks down the door, it isn’t difficult, the wood has already given way, the bolt that holds it is an iron chain, rusted and bent, kept in place by a wooden peg that itself is so worn down it holds on to the door by a sliver and a prayer. Both give way to D’s blow. He then tears the blue curtain off.

  She sees it all, the breaking, the entering, she sees it standing in the middle of the living room, without a flicker on her face; she tells Tariq to go hide in the bathroom, lock it from the inside. As if nothing has happened, as if only a strong breeze has entered the house and will soon go away, after toppling, harmlessly, a few glasses, after rattling a few windows, whipping a few curtains.

  Inside the bathroom, the water from her bath last night hasn’t dried yet, her slippers are still there, the soapsuds still fresh and wet.

  The wood in the bathroom door, just like in the main door, is chipped where the latch is. This creates a chink small enough to go unnoticed from the outside but large enough for Tariq to bring his left eye to and see everything.

  See the shapes, the arms and the legs, the faces, the lips, the eyes as the mob squeezes into this tiny aperture, its blur made sharper and more focused so that he sees everything more clearly, the edges hard and defined. He sees them first stand in a circle, he sees one of them piss in the centre of the room, he sees the others stand around and laugh, he sees them empty out cupboards and shelves, he sees them throwing down cups, plates, spoons, kick in the small television set Mother bought just last month, reach inside, through the smoking glass, and wrench the wires out, he sees them walk to his study table, turn it over, pull the drawers out, fling everything inside, one by one, into the centre of the room. His pencils, his geometry box, his eraser, his schoolbag, his tiffin-box, his exercise books (the one where his mother has written, the one where his teacher has written); he sees them tear the books, page by page, until they get tired, he sees them pull the curtains down, fling them into the centre, into the pool of piss, he sees them spit on the bed, stamp on the sheet with their shoes, like little boys playing. Like angry little boys fighting.

  And then Tariq sees everything they do to his mother.

  A, C and D.

  B watches.

  But they haven’t seen him yet, they think there is no one else there, that this woman was alone last night and is alone this morning.

  He hears D say: ‘You live alone,’ and he can’t hear her reply, all he can see is a bit of her forehead, on the floor. Her bare legs, her knees, his mother’s knees. This is the first time he sees his mother’s knees.

  He can scream:

  ‘So what if the police didn’t come and if they did, they only watched from the street outside, I don’t need the police, Mother isn’t alone, I am Tariq, I am her son, I will be the police, I will break open the door and I will rush out and before you can even move, before you can even understand what’s happening, I will pick up my mother, I will pick up all my books, all my school things, my mother and I will then crack open the floor, together we will fall down, the earth shall part for us, before you can even say your name, we will be in the tunnel below the surface of the earth, we will travel fast, far away from any one of you, into cities and towns and villages that you can not see, that you will never see, where you will never be able to reach us, the earth shall close as soon as we have dropped inside and the ground shall move beneath your feet but you won’t be able to do anything, it will be too late, if you want to get to us, you will have to crack the earth open again, maybe hope for an earthquake like the one that came to this city last year or if the earth doesn’t open there is the sky, I will lift her and we will fly out of the window and above the street, over and above all of you, leaving you standing down there and turning your heads to look but all you will see is my mother and I against the sky, rising higher and higher, on TV, they will show it too, we will be so far away that all you can see is the morning sky above this city, smoke, a few crows flying, dust, the last patches of fog melting in the sunlight. And my mother and I, safe.’

  But that is reason, he can hear only rhyme. He can see them pour the kerosene, light the match. He sees the curtains catch alight first.

  Ma, don’t you worry,

  You won’t feel the pain.

  The fire will be gone,

  Then will come the rain.

  Its drops will be cold, />
  Its tears will be wet,

  But I’m not going to cry

  At least, not yet.

  Rhyme’s over, now can we have some reason?

  No, reason can wait. Who cares for reason? Why doesn’t Reason, the right, honourable Reason, come out and reveal itself to all of us? Why does it, instead, slink into the shadows behind the burnt houses, bury itself deep in the pile of ash, in the heap of embers? Why does it dive below the bed, in between sheets, into the hem of pillowcases? Why does it slither into books, like silverfish? Worm itself into the page, the paragraph, the middle of a sentence? Then into a word? And even if you trap it there, close the covers hard, press Reason flat against the page, why does it burrow into the letters, hide between their curves and their loops, inside the dots of the is, below the dashes of the ts? Why the hell doesn’t it burst forth from wherever it’s concealed itself, dazzle us all in this darkness, blind us with its flash? So that we can all see what Reason has to say to Tariq.

  (When that happens, let the boy know. Until then, he will live with rhyme. It’s silly. But that’s the way it is.

  Because what do you want the kid to do?

  You want him to scream, ‘I am an eyewitness to the city on fire’? You want him to write it out, in letters, each as big as a building, I AM AN EYEWITNESS TO THE CITY ON FIRE, you want him to etch these in shining silk, onto a banner so huge he can drape the entire city with it? Maybe then everyone can read it, from above and below, even passengers inside aircraft on their way to Delhi or Mumbai, pedestrians on the street, walking, all forced to look up, notice this shimmering curtain, newly installed in the sky above their city. Maybe then, this curtain hovering above, every day every night, will cause someone to sit with the child, record his complaint. Maybe then some judge, who doesn’t like the curtain blocking the sun, the moon or the rain, will take note. His Lordship will neither smirk nor sneer just because the eyewitness’s skin is cracked and dry, just because the eyewitness breaks into verse conjured up then and there. He will listen carefully, he will ask the right questions, will push and prod, cajole and encourage, will wake up the sleeping prosecutors, frame charges, hold hearings.

  Get A, B, C, D, E, all the way to Z, to come and defend themselves. And then when the judge is done with Tariq, maybe he will move on to the next one, to the second eyewitness. Who will appear a little while later.)

  Meanwhile, what does Tariq do after they all have left?

  He sits on the floor where what was home is now at his feet. He watches over his mother’s body, he looks at what’s left, at the smashed television set, the wires, the tube and the screen, the glass panes gone, the curtains ripped, his school-book out on the street, all burning, the flames, red, blue and yellow. He sits there as night slips into morning slips into midday into afternoon, as the police come and go, as they take her away, as photographers arrive to take pictures, as the TV woman fakes a tear while she speaks to the camera, and he hides from all of them because he knows the places in the house to hide. Then he sits, waiting for the shadows to loom again, for the street lights to be switched on, the insects to reappear, and then he will go out, stand where he stood last night and look at his life, just ten or eleven years gone, the rest stretching ahead.

  Like the long, littered road in front that leads to a place he’s never been to, alone, without his mother.

  END OF FIRST ATTACHMENT

  12. Shabnam

  (The Second Attachment)

  THIS is her father’s auto-rickshaw, her father who has been killed, her mother, too. This is a city on fire. And she’s running, she’s running, she’s running, this second eyewitness.

  Name is Shabnam.

  Age sixteen, plus or minus one. This daughter this girl this woman this child, in black salwar kameez, her shoes with shoelaces, melting and dropping off, their soles, their straps, their rubber, their leather, their plastic, their everything. In the heat, the black tar on the street has cracked and blistered, its surface molten extruding into countless spikes that stick to her feet, scrape her soles. As if a giant brush has suddenly emerged from the earth, with its bristles of black grass, hard and metallic, spreading itself out beneath every step she takes. And this brush is wiping, licking, stripping her feet, her heels too, both her insteps, all her ten toes, even the skin in between so that the fire can rage without any resistance, so the flames can slip underneath her salwar legs, singe whatever fuzz remains on her calves, dart to lick the inside of her knees, char her skin, push it to peeling. Make the brown pink, make her nails glisten, her eyes water.

  And Shabnam isn’t used to running so hard, running so long, Father would have never allowed it. Father, who ferries the city through the day and through the night in the auto-rickshaw he bought three months ago, using his life’s savings as down-payment for a loan. No, Father would have never allowed it.

  ‘My daughter should never have to run on the street,’ he told her, ‘when I am there.’ The day he got the auto-rickshaw, it was a Friday. The bank had given him a watch as a gift with the loan. ‘Cars come with clocks on the dashboard,’ the loan officer had told him, ‘auto-rickshaws don’t, so here, take this watch, it’s automatic. You only need to replace the batteries.’ Her father had slipped the watch on, taken the auto-rickshaw to the mosque for his prayers and returned home. Mother and Shabnam were waiting. The vehicle came home on a Friday, he told them, it is special, it would run faster, it would weave in and out of traffic better than the others, it would not tilt if there were too many passengers. It was sturdy, even if a bus grazed it no harm would come to anybody. And now he had his watch, Shabnam would never be late.

  ‘I will drop my Shabnam to school every day,’ Father said, ‘every day we shall take a different route. And if there are no passengers, I shall come to pick you up as well. In a few months, she will go to college, the first girl in my family, the first girl in this neighbourhood, to go to college.’

  At night, when Father slept, and Mother cleared the kitchen, washing the dishes so she didn’t have to do them first thing when she woke up in the morning, Shabnam, her schoolwork completed, would clean the auto-rickshaw. She knew its every corner, the hollow beneath the passenger seat, the ridges on the floor, in the footrest, the No Entry board nailed on the right side, Father’s driver seat that curved just the right amount for him to rest his weak back. Taking a mop, a clean handkerchief, one of hers, Shabnam would wipe the rubber grip of the handrest in front so that Father’s palms remained clean when he reached out to help her get inside. She would wipe the windscreen, sometimes even breathing into the glass (to fog it, use the moisture) to make it sparkle.

  ‘Shabnam, you clean it so well that in the morning it seems there is no windscreen, I can see everything,’ Father told her.

  Now there is no windscreen; the auto-rickshaw is there, Father isn’t. Mother isn’t. And Shabnam is running as if her feet have wings and these wings are on fire and she’s looking for a place to hide. Cold, preferably. Wet, it will help.

  The heat from the fire in the house and now from below, from above, from the left and from the right has blackened her face, brought out the sweat from inside her, matting her hair that falls almost to her waist and sticks to her forehead, like bars in a cage. Just looking at Shabnam running, you can’t tell, nobody can tell, whether she is child or adult. Whether her skin is wrinkled because of the fire or because of her age. Just looking at her, from head to toe, sizing up her height, you won’t know a thing because she is neither short nor tall. When the smoke enters her eyes, she cries like she’s eight, without making any noise, like a little girl who’s fallen off a swing in the playground, into a sandpit, and is not hurt, only shocked. When she breathes the smoke in, she coughs like she’s eighty, as if her insides are ancient and tired, as if they want to get out, uncoil themselves and pull the rest of her down the street. When she jumps over a brick, or a tyre burning or a manhole cover opened, it’s as if she’s thirteen, nimble and quick, as if she knows every step she is taki
ng. (The men who came crashing into her house, A, B, C and D, had looked at her, screaming in one corner, and they had laughed. C had pointed to the dark fabric of her kameez, crumpled and stained, and asked her about her breasts: ‘Are those full-grown, are they new, are they old, are they small or are they just crumpled balls of paper you are hiding in the pockets of your shirt? Want me to check?’)

  Shabnam is running. To a place she doesn’t know.

  Her eyes fixed in front, frozen, as if that place were only a few yards away, as if, in the middle of this city on fire, she has seen something that you haven’t, as if she has seen a lake, placid, cold and blue, with patches of warmth and green because of the hyacinth, the lotuses and fallen leaves. She has seen the water, knee-deep, right in front where the street ends, and she’s running into it. So that within minutes, no, make it seconds, there will be a splash. And Shabnam will enter that pool.

  There will be a hiss that you can hear above the sound of her running footsteps, the gasp of her breath. The fire will fight with the water and the fire will lose, leaving behind only smoke that will rise into the night like creepers hug a black wall. Shabnam will then slow down because of the water’s drag; she will rest, maybe. In this lake which is not deep, a lake that’s safe, where you don’t need to swim, where she doesn’t have to be afraid that she will drown. Shabnam will run into this lake, she may even sit down in the water, let it flow all around, over her head, her face, enter her ears, her nose, her eyes, wash the grime and the soot and the dirt and the sweat and the bruises and the cuts and the blood, wet her shirt, cool her body. She will lower herself farther down so that even her head is under water, her hair will float, like black reeds, she will sit there and she will sit there. When she opens her eyes, she will see what lies beneath. Tiny fish, brightly coloured, swimming in shoals around her, welcoming her with little quivers of their gills and their tails, lighting the darkness with their eyes, glassy, and their scales, glinting. She will see big flowers, their petals wet and floating in between the tall, thin plants that grow only under water, only in this lake and nowhere else in the world, white in the green and blue. She will see water-fairies riding on seahorses she has seen so far only in books and pictures, she will see children who live under water in houses made of coral. She will see them play on swings that move in the water, she will see bubbles of air from their mouths, brightly coloured. And although it’s night, although there is a moon above the lake, shrouded by the smoke from the fire, she will see a soft sunlight, yellow and orange and green, bathing the entire floor of the lake, making the children’s houses sparkle and get reflected in the children’s eyes, making their pupils gleam like points of silver.