Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  At any other time (in fact, until a couple of hours ago, before I had met Bright Shirt), if someone had proposed this, I would have put my foot down, said no way, are you crazy? But I had decided, back at the station itself, that if I was going to let myself be led, I shouldn’t let myself be weighed down with doubts and apprehensions. Yes, in deciding this, I knew I was taking a gigantic leap of faith, but then hadn’t I already taken that leap in the morning, stepping out of the house with Ithim in a bag? (The problem was that I had taken the leap and was still in midair, the earth rushing up to meet me, and I wasn’t letting go. Well, now I would do it, I would let myself land wherever the gravity of the earth or the wings in my feet took me.)

  So I smiled at Bright Shirt and said: ‘Anything you say.’

  ‘That’s the spirit, sir,’ he said, not showing the slightest surprise over my ready acquiescence, as he clambered down to his berth. ‘You try to catch some sleep now. I will wake you up when it’s time.’

  But sleep didn’t come.

  I sat up on the berth, my head almost touching the ceiling. To my left, I could see a display board, the letters painted in red, the paint uneven, congealed into lumpy drops at the tips of the letters. Secure luggage with wire ropes provided under the seat, To Stop Train Pull Chain, Penalty for Use Without Reasonable and Sufficient Cause, Fine up to Rs 1000 and/or Imprisonment up to One Year. Bright Shirt, of course, knew all this and I was ready to go to prison for one year.

  Wide awake, I closed my eyes, covered them with the back of my right palm. Once again, I saw Mother sleeping on the cold cement floor, I heard the rain pouring in the dark outside, I saw the scorpion lying dead, its pincers mangled under the weight of the hammer. This wasn’t a dream, I was sure of that – it was definitely a memory but why had I remembered it now? What could have been the trigger? Try hard as I did, I couldn’t place it at all.

  (When my mother died, I remember coming back home after the funeral, after setting her on fire – all the while standing in front, instead of tears I had been gripped with fear, afraid the logs of wood stacked on top of her would fall and I would be then forced to watch her burn – and seeing friends and relatives filling the house and hoping that by doing this they could crowd out my grief. They told me what a responsible son I had been, how I had taken care of my mother once Father had died, how strong I was and how perfectly capable I was of doing justice to her memory. And once they had left, once their words had slid down my body and collected in tired little heaps on the floor along with the dust from their shoes and the petals of the flowers that had decked Mother’s body, more than the grief, I had felt a crushing, permanent sense of loss: gone was the only person in the world who, every time she looked at me, however old I may have been or would become, would see a child, someone no one else would or could ever see. I haven’t been able to fill that loss and I don’t think I ever will, although I wonder what makes me want to be seen still as a child when I am now a father. So, perhaps, the prospect of losing my wife, of Ithim losing his mother, had taken me back to that night when a boy sat on the floor in the rain trying to save his mother’s life. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe because I had not heard my wife talk about Ithim yet, this had prompted me to recall Mother’s words on that night of the scorpion, that mothers are the same everywhere, they always think of their children first.)

  Or maybe I was just playing around.

  With my thoughts. Letting my heightened anticipation of what lay ahead make my mind mirror the train. Hurtling in the dark, careening, swaying, threatening to switch tracks, get derailed, fly off. Land on the ground in a heap of twisted metal and debris. I had to rein it in, bring it back on track. I would do this by reading Miss Glass’s message again. That sheaf of papers in the bag.

  MISS Glass’s message. Yes, that was it, would focus my thoughts, push this clutter away. I took the pages out from the bag, let the bag hang on the hook below the display board, let it swing in arcs with the train. And I read Miss Glass’s message again.

  ‘Please read them carefully,’ she had written, ‘they need time and concentration. It will help you and it will help me if you read them before you reach the station . . .’ Sitting in Mr Meeko’s cybercafe, I had read these pages once but then the details had been drowned in the swirl of events that had followed. Now I was captive – there were at least two hours to go before I had to jump off the train (I couldn’t believe I had said yes to Bright Shirt’s Bright Idea) – why not read the three messages again? And I decided that this time, I would read them as if I were at work, in my office, making sense of research reports. With a clear head for facts and figures, numbers and data.

  I began with the first attachment, about Tariq and his mother, and I looked at the picture that prefaced the text, the charred house, the burnt windows and the missing ceiling. And there it was, staring at me, it didn’t take me even a minute to notice it: the pavement.

  I was looking at something I had seen earlier, long before Miss Glass had sent me the message, in fact, even before Miss Glass had made the telephone call that night. It was the image I had found in her room in the Burns Ward.

  This was the complete picture.

  So did this mean that what I had seen in the hospital was a foreshadow of things to come?

  My eyes raced through the pages and over the words, over the description of Shabnam running, her feet on fire, past Ahmed’s Meat Shop, past the shoe shop and Rehman Tailoring, the three shops that I had seen that morning, charred and burnt. So she was in my neighbourhood last night?

  And then the poems.

  The four-line stanzas, the second and the fourth lines rhyming, simple sentences, in Miss Glass’s message, in all the three attachments. In Tariq: Ma don’t you worry, you won’t feel the pain, the fire will be gone, now will come the rain. In Shabnam: Black magic, white magic, brown magic, blue, whatever the colour, I will still get you. And throughout the third attachment. Let’s get it over with, just as we did, the auto-rickshaw man, and the woman who hid.

  And it was this rhyming that Bright Shirt used too when I met him at the railway station. His silly poems about you look quite beat, So let’s sit down for a while, and get something to eat and about Ithim being like a star in the night, and did I really want to fix him right? The same scheme, the same trivial tone. Who was the author then of the three messages?

  Miss Glass hadn’t mentioned anything about that, she said she had taken some pictures. Maybe it was Bright Shirt himself. Bright Shirt, this jokester, this buffoon who was now sleeping soundly?

  What had started out as an attempt to unravel everything had now ended up tying me further and further into knots, throwing up questions that generated more questions, until I had to close my eyes again in what seemed to be a futile effort to escape the confusing circle in which I found myself hopelessly trapped.

  I tried to think it through, bring logic to the equation, but even assuming my hunch was on the right track, even if I were to go along with the hypothesis that there had to be some link between the three incidents, the three killings, what did any of that have to do with Miss Glass and her message? Other than the fact I lived in the neighbourhood that Shabnam – possibly – ran across late in the night when I was asleep with Ithim? And what did this all have to do with Ithim? And this journey? And setting him right?

  ‘The time has come

  To jump off the train,

  You go to the door

  While I pull the chain.

  Don’t you worry, sir,

  Very safe is your Ithim,

  Wherever we go,

  You’ll always be with him.’

  That infuriating, singsong voice again, that nasal whine, that rhyme, Bright Shirt was now standing, smoothing his shirt, his hair, adjusting his glasses, smiling at me.

  ‘You didn’t sleep a wink,’ he said.

  ‘No, I was reading Miss Glass’s message. Tell me one thing, Bright Shirt, did you write it?’

  No, he wasn’t going to giv
e anything away, this clown.

  ‘Give me that bag,

  Let me put Ithim inside.

  Just look what unfolds

  And keep those questions aside.’

  And he climbed onto my berth, to pull the chain.

  Everything went exactly as per plan.

  On the way to the entrance of the coach, I passed an old woman returning to her berth from the toilet. She turned sideways to let me pass, our eyes didn’t even meet. And it became clear to me that Bright Shirt had, indeed, done his homework. As he had pointed out, almost everyone was fast asleep; it was almost midnight and being an air-conditioned coach, all the passengers were concealed behind curtains, thick and heavy, fastened by loops made of cloth that ensured they stayed in place despite the movement of the train. The safe passage these curtains provided was made safer by the dim blue-green of the nightlights overhead.

  When I reached the end of the coach and opened the door, all I could see was the blackness rushing by, the shapes of trees, telegraph poles, and what looked like distant hills set against the sky. A narrow strip of light, from inside the coach, raced over the stone-chipped bank outside; we must have been passing through empty fields because I couldn’t see a single street lamp or a village lantern. How did Bright Shirt know where to stop the train? There was no obvious landmark.

  But, almost as if on cue, there was a piercing, hissing noise, like steam being released under extreme pressure from some monster hydraulic machine. Brakes squealing, the train’s clatter began to quieten slowly and steadily until it became a creak and a whine and the train slowed down.

  I peered out, the air slapped me hard on the face, tore at my hair. I could see Bright Shirt and Ithim now halfway out of the window, Bright Shirt waving at me, gesturing to me to jump. But how could I? The train was still moving too fast. Then I saw him jump, a blur of bright colour in the black.

  So I followed.

  The train was still moving when I hit the air.

  It was still moving when I hit the ground.

  21. Water and Canvas

  AND I landed in water although on first impact, it felt nothing like water; there was neither a splash nor a ripple, no wetness, no drag. But it was water, there was no doubt about it. Water that reached up to my knees, water that stretched as far as my eye could see, on either side, in front and behind, the surface stretched out like glass, black, glinting and endless.

  ‘Don’t look back, keep moving forward,’ Bright Shirt said, standing a few feet away, his vivid colours glowing in the dark, the water up to his chest, inches away from Ithim in his bag.

  But I had already turned to look. The train had by now slowed down to a stop and I saw its reflection in the surface of the water, a panoramic view of the train, above and below, its windows, the frosted in the first-class coaches, the barred in the others, a row of lights, dim and yellow, tiny rectangles all arranged in a straight line. Its blue coaches now black rectangles silhouetted against the sky. So placid was the water and along with it the reflection of the train that it seemed I was looking at a painting, perhaps Still Life, Train at Night, the black canvas stretched tight, taut from one end of the sky to the other. Adding to this effect was the silence and the odd colour of the sky, not black as in the city, but more a deep shade of purple like an over-ripe plum, the stars sprayed like flecks of powdered sugar. Even the low-hanging moon sparkled, as if someone had climbed up and scrubbed it clean; it had not one dark smudge.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked Bright Shirt, my voice so magnified by the silence that I was surprised by its loudness.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said in reply, ‘let’s get out of here before the guard finds out. Keep walking and hurry up.’

  I turned, my back to the train now, and took the first step forward. In that expanse of water, there was no sign of any trail or road I could use to navigate, but Bright Shirt was the guide and I followed. He seemed to glide, with an amphibian ease and grace, as if he knew every inch of the terrain, above and below. I have crossed through flooded streets in the city but here it took me a while before I could fall in step, before I could move forward without constantly having to look down to see where I was treading. For, one, each step I took was noiseless, making it confusing, if not impossible, to believe that I was really walking at all. And, two, the surface was so clear, so transparent, that in the soft light of the scrubbed moon and the flecked stars, I could not but keep looking at what lay below. So I was torn between looking down and looking forward, between stopping and moving.

  And ironically, it was when I looked down that I realized I needed no compass, no sense of direction. Because instead of what I had expected to see – dirt tracks, grass, mud, saplings, stones – I saw below my feet a ribbon of concrete, black and smooth, streaked by broken white lines. Exactly like the new highways springing up just outside the city. This black strip was complete with road reflectors and cat’s eyes that glittered in the dark like corals on a seabed I had once seen on TV.

  ‘Where are we?’ I asked Bright Shirt again, this time more sure of my footing.

  ‘Miss Glass calls it The Hideout,’ he said, stopping in his tracks and waiting, politely, for me to catch up. ‘This is where they will come, we hope, those running away from the city on fire. Those who can run, those who cannot. The city has set up shelters for the living, the relief camps, but when Miss Glass went to look, she found neither relief nor a camp. Just open spaces baking in the heat, crammed with men, women and children, more women and children than men. She walked on the hard stone floor, she saw flies get trapped in her hair, she saw children playing hide and seek in portable toilets that overflowed with stench and sludge. She saw food being cooked in ovens, food that no one dared touch since it was fried on flames. She saw the fear of fire in their eyes, and she said we have to have this place, we have to have The Hideout. That’s why we decided there will be water here, wherever you can see, to ensure there is no fire. Never ever. Even if someone tries, no spark will light here, no flame will burn. That’s why in the dark the only glow is that provided by the people and their clothes and their skin and the things under the water themselves. The tiniest accident has to be avoided, so no house here has any electricity connection either; we can’t take the slightest chance with sparks, especially when there is so much water around. Let’s go a little farther ahead and then you will see what we have done, what she has done, Miss Glass. She is amazing, she is our saviour, she is our angel.’

  These words came in a torrential although muted whisper as if Bright Shirt didn’t want to disturb anyone in the dark. Since we had met, this was the most he had spoken in one uninterrupted stretch, and as if he was suddenly and acutely aware of this, he then lapsed into silence, turning to walk away, not waiting to see what effect these words had on me.

  Just when they were sinking in, his bizarre explanation, I heard a noise from behind. It was the train, its wheels beginning to move again, along with their reflection in the water, both gathering speed until that sound, too, faded into the overwhelming silence that now draped The Hideout.

  How long we walked I lost track of but what I am sure of is how another memory of my mother came back, this time with the first sight of the first house. From where I was, it looked like any ordinary dwelling in a marooned village or town, a low brick structure looming in the dark, ringed by water. Almost exactly like the house my parents had lived in, before they moved to the city. My mother had showed me its photograph and told me its story, how one monsoon it had rained non-stop for nine days, how the river had breached its banks and floodwater had inundated the entire ground floor and some of the first as well so that my parents, my mother then pregnant with me, had to live on the roof for three days and nights, scanning the skies for the sight of an army helicopter – they called it Big Bird – hovering above to drop packets of rice and sugar onto the roof. And when the packets landed in the water instead, the sound they made, my mother said, would break her heart because she knew that I – who was still i
nside her – would have to go hungry. (‘Mothers always think about their children first,’ she had said.)

  ‘Look.’ Bright Shirt was pointing to the house that had suddenly loomed out of the dark as if it had sprung up right there, right then, in front of our eyes. ‘These are houses we built only last night once we knew the number of the dead would keep rising. Aren’t they special?’ There was no mistaking the note of admiration in his voice.

  And it was not without reason.

  For this was a house like nothing I had seen before. What at first glance seemed like an ordinary brick structure, the kind in Mother’s photograph, was actually planned with meticulous and, if I may add, fanciful care. It was just inches above the water level so water lapped against its doors and its walls, making it seem that the house was perched on a tiny invisible island. When I walked closer, almost to its door as if to knock – ‘Don’t be afraid, just go and look,’ Bright Shirt encouraged me – I realized that not only was there water around the house, it was inside as well.

  This was a house of air and water, air outside, water within, water that made its walls quiver, as if the house were a living creature that had just come to the surface to breathe before diving back into the depths.

  ‘They are so happy here,’ Bright Shirt said, standing behind me, so close that I could feel the breath of his words.

  They were three people, a family: a mother, a father and a child, son or daughter I couldn’t see, as I looked through the window. The windowpanes were made of pale blue glass through which I could see a soft yellow light filling the space inside. It was like a tank or a huge pool in which they were swimming, bathed by the glow and the silent ripples of the water. I saw the graceful strokes of their legs, their arms, powering them forward, their hair billowing behind perfectly, like in movies, little bubbles of air breaking free from their lips.