Fireproof

by Raj Kamal Jha

  ‘Who are they?’ I asked and Bright Shirt shrugged his shoulders, glided away into the distance. ‘We are losing count,’ he said, ‘we can’t keep track of the names, of the details. We are getting them by the hour, by the minute. These three were killed last night, all of them sleeping when the house was set ablaze. The fire spread so fast the child didn’t even wake up.’

  He ended the sentence and the second house appeared, making me stop in my tracks suddenly. I faltered, almost fell face down into the water, tripping over something unseen, unfelt. For the first time since I had been told about the city on fire, I could feel a chill creeping from my toes up, so strong and so deep that it made even the water around me colder to the touch, on my knees and around my calves. There it was, in a house identical to the previous one, a house lit inside and full of water, just in front of me the kitchen I had seen, just hours ago on the train, in the message about the old schoolteacher, in the third attachment Miss Glass had sent.

  This was Abba’s kitchen.

  Except that the kitchen here was arranged almost to perfection, with the same objects as the one in the picture, the same cups and plates, the same dishes, the same kettle, the same clothes on one wall, the two dish racks on two walls, one with the tiny two-shelf cupboard with a white frame, the walking stick on the floor, a charred log of wood in the centre but everything was suffused with a back-lit radiance of the kind they have in magazine photographs of model kitchens. And, of course, everything was under water. As I stared into this room, cold with disbelief, a woman swam in, a young woman whose face I could not see. She swam, she glided, she flitted from one end of one wall to the other, picking up items from the shelves, arranging them, rearranging, as if she were working in the kitchen but, surprisingly, leaving the items lying on the floor untouched.

  ‘That look familiar, Mr Jay?’ Bright Shirt was smiling and his eyes had a gleam I had not seen before. ‘Look into the other room,’ he said, and gestured towards the next room in the same house where there was another woman, older and heavier, also arranging things, what looked like a schoolbag and books on a table. She was wearing a blue sari and her long black hair unfurled behind her in the water. Was she the woman in the first attachment, was she Tariq’s mother? Bright Shirt had reached into the bag and pulled out the sheets of paper, Miss Glass’s message. ‘You want to read these again?’ I tore the pages away from him; I didn’t need to read them, yes these were the pictures I had seen on the train.

  And here, in The Hideout, these pictures had taken a life of their own.

  It’s at this point that I should have stopped, that any man, any woman, with any sense of what is real and what is not would have stopped.

  I SHOULD have let my head clear, I should have taken a step back, seen through the absurdity of it all, I should have told Bright Shirt that no, I wasn’t buying any of this, that it wasn’t happening, that this construction, apparition, whatever you may call it, had to be little more than a dream. (Perhaps I was still on board the train, fast asleep.) It’s at this point that I should have told him to give me my Ithim back. And I should have turned, walked back to the railway tracks, followed them to the next station and there I should have waited for the next train to the city and returned home. Six hours coming, six hours going, I would have been back in my room in the morning, Ithim on the bed, safe and sound.

  But I did none of these things.

  We had already moved away from the two houses and those rooms I had just seen seemed to dissolve in the water so quickly and so effortlessly that I didn’t have time to dwell on them at all, my eyes being pulled now by what lay ahead, a setting of such singular beauty that, instead of letting my reason come to the fore, I pushed it back as far as I could and asked Bright Shirt to let Ithim see what I was seeing. I wanted to share it with my child.

  Bright Shirt said Ithim was wide awake and he was, indeed, watching the night, the water, the houses of air and water and the people swimming inside. Maybe this was it, I thought, this was the place where Ithim would be set right, in this place called The Hideout, where the water was so special people could live under it. Where pictures, still, and black and white, transform into the scenes they depict, of resplendent colour. It was this belief, anchoring itself as a conviction, that my son’s perfect eyes were watching this wondrous spectacle unfold and soon he would be set right that prompted me – instead of turning back as I should have done – to take the next step, the next step, and the next step. Allowing the water to close in, open up, close in, open up and around my feet.

  What reinforced this belief was what I saw beyond the houses: children playing under the water. Five, six, seven years old, some even younger, two or three, one was almost a baby, a few months older than Ithim, I think, their faces blurred through the water, their clothes of a material that shone in the dark. They were in a park, there was a playground. There were children on brightly coloured swings that cut smoothly through the water with each arc they took, there were some on slides that shifted gently yet ceaselessly. The children were all swimming, equipped with what seemed like gills on either side of their heads, tiny, wafer-thin shimmering translucent ears that trembled in the water and propelled them forward. If these children had grown gills and taken to the water, maybe the water did have some magical powers, powers that could, as Miss Glass had said, set Ithim right.

  As I saw the children, I also saw the scene below the surface shift. Either side of the black concrete strip where I was walking, there opened up a landscape of trees and plants, ferns and sea shells of dazzling colours. Fish that swam in and out of the leaves once in a while, coming to the surface where they would turn into birds and then fly away into the dark, leaving a trail of sparkling water drops in the air. Under the purple-plum sky.

  ‘Miss Glass is the one behind all that you see,’ said Bright Shirt. ‘She chose this place because it’s not far from the city and yet no one there knows about it. In fact, in the daytime if you come here, there’s nothing; the water dries up and it’s like any other landscape seen from the window of a railway train. The kind of place you pass by, not worth a second glance.’

  ‘What happens to all these people, these houses, the children during the day?’ I asked, knowing very well that whatever answer I got would defy logic and reason just as the scene in front of me did.

  ‘They go all around, wherever they want. Some of them rest in the trees, the children dance on the tips of the leaves or hide under blades of grass. Some of the adults roam the city trying to see if anything has been left behind in houses that are now burnt down. They sift through debris, they pick up, they leave behind. Maybe you saw some of them on your way from the mall to the station this afternoon.’

  ‘Give me my Ithim,’ I shouted – screamed – making Bright Shirt stop, a puzzled look on his face at this sudden outburst, completely unconnected with what he had just been telling me.

  Or was it?

  For hours now, since the afternoon in the railway station when he had taken Ithim from me – you rest for a while, he had said, let me carry him – I had not held my son. Even in the train, I had climbed onto the upper berth and dozed off, secure in the belief that Bright Shirt was taking good care of Ithim. (Which he was, there was no doubt about that. In fact, it had struck me, watching both of them on several occasions, that Bright Shirt displayed an unusual tenderness in his affection, almost a sense of familiarity that I doubt even I had. Perhaps this was the very reason that I wanted Ithim with me. For if there was one thing the events of the last few hours – or were they last few minutes? I can never be sure – had done to me, it was to make me doubt every thing that I had so far taken for granted, including the fact that Ithim was mine and would remain with me. So when I saw my child with Bright Shirt, it fuelled a fear that I could be losing my grip not only on myself but over my child as well.)

  ‘Here, take him,’ Bright Shirt said, ‘yes, I think it’s now your turn, I have been lugging this young man for a while now.’

&nbs
p; The bag still covering Ithim, since I didn’t want even an accidental splash of a water drop on him, I showed him the playground below the water, I showed him fishes, the black concrete, the white broken line marking the lanes. I stopped at a window and showed him the inside of a house, the nursery there, a cot and walls brightly coloured, toys that floated and swam. I showed him a mother who was sitting in a rocking chair, swaying, like mothers in English storybooks, a child in her lap, I knew Ithim couldn’t hear but still I told him his mother was waiting for him in the hospital and she would do that too and tell him stories. And I told him he had the best story of them all. He had seen what no child ever sees, except in movies or comic books; he had seen a fairy-tale land and he was the one now who knew all its tales.

  Ithim blinked at me and I saw the drops glittering on his eyelashes and I knew they were tears of joy, of amazement. Maybe he realized too, in his one-day-old head, not fully formed, the bones still moving underneath the skin, that the time had come for him to be set right.

  FROM the seemingly sublime to the obviously ridiculous, there’s no other way to describe what happened next. The Hideout soon gave way to The Tent, the water ending as abruptly as it had begun, petering out into a ring of slush and mud that spattered the edges of a sprawling canvas tent, not unlike one of thousands of such tents that sprout in lawns and parks during the wedding season in the city. But this one had no such pretensions. It was a tent, plain and simple and makeshift, with naked light bulbs fastened with electric wiring on bamboo poles, one more indication that we had left The Hideout behind, we had left the world with no fires, not even a spark.

  There was no denying, though, that this semblance of normalcy, in the setting, if not the circumstances, came as a great comfort after The Hideout. But when Bright Shirt lifted the canvas flap at the entrance and Ithim and I walked in, I saw this was no tent for a gathering; it was more like a venue for a performance, a show: there were rows and rows of seats, all plastic chairs with armrests, facing a stage.

  The red chairs were closest to the stage, set in seven concentric rows. Behind them was the blue section, another set of concentric circles, this time about ten or eleven or even a dozen, and behind the blue was the white – the same chairs in all three sections, just different colours – and it was in the rear, where the last row of white chairs ended, that the gallery began. Wooden planks arranged in steps, empty spaces in between, like a tiered arena, almost a dozen or so tiers. And while the chairs were empty, red, blue and white, I could see the gallery was crowded, almost crammed. When we entered, the lights inside had been switched off leaving just the stage lights on. The red section, therefore, was the only one that was lit, the gallery was in shadow.

  ‘We will be here.’ Bright Shirt pointed to a chair in the very first row. ‘These are special seats, you can see everything clearly.

  ‘Please bear with this, sir, please.’ Bright Shirt’s tone was back to being cloying and apologetic, just as it was at the railway station when he had first met me. ‘Except for Miss Glass and myself, no one here knows anything about you, or Ithim, or that you are here with me. Before we begin, there is this little thing that we need to do for the audience, to keep them entertained.’

  I couldn’t say a word; I didn’t know what word to say.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ said Bright Shirt. ‘Mr Jay, it will be for about five minutes or so, just a little juggling act. And then a short play in which all your questions will be answered. Here, let me take Ithim. I think he needs a feed and cleaning up. I will get him right back, we will let him watch the show as well.’

  So comfortable and reassuring his tone was that I didn’t even think twice. That I, who had just retrieved Ithim from him, afraid I was losing control, now just sat back in the red chair and handed over my child, let him go. From behind, from the gallery, I could hear noises, claps, laughs, a hushed roar like the sound of a radio cricket commentary.

  At first, I thought the show hadn’t begun because I saw several people on stage and none of them seemed to be performers, no one in any costume – in fact, Bright Shirt seemed to be the only one dressed for the occasion – all men and women, young and old and poor, their clothes torn, their faces drawn, some sweeping the floor, some pulling at a thick nylon cord that activated a pulley high above the ground, some dragging tables and chairs on or off the stage.

  Others were pointing to the band above, in a balcony above the stage: four men, one with a guitar, another at a synthesizer, the third on the drums and the fourth, a flute, and they were tuning their instruments, adjusting their speakers and the lights. And all this was going on right in front of the audience, in their full view, the curtains raised, the stage being set, the props being put in place.

  Where had Bright Shirt taken Ithim?

  Suddenly I was seized by a fear that Ithim would be put on display, maybe that’s why the pulleys were there, to hoist him atop a platform that would move around giving everyone a ringside view of his blinking, his perfect eyes and his deformed form. Like the Ukrainian man and the Korean woman.

  (I had heard that in some villages near the city they did hold such shows, and perhaps I had been trapped into bringing Ithim here so that they could take him away from me, for ever. And, yes, Ithim was such that people would come from far and wide to look at him, even if they had to pay ten-fifteen rupees per ticket. They would come and point at him and say, look, look at this boy, can he shout and scream? see if it twitches, can he feel? touch him, run your fingers down his charred forehead, check if he can smell, bring a lighted match to his face, see if he can smell the burning, see if the heat makes him draw back, look at his eyes and his eyelashes and his eyebrows, he looks like a monkey, can he jump, can he make faces, can he cry through those eyes, let’s hit him on the face and see if the monkey-face gets wet.)

  Bright Shirt was nowhere to be seen; all I could see were the shapes in the gallery, heads and arms and legs, no face in the audience visible in the dark. Bright Shirt had said no one was aware of me but they must have seen me enter, sit in the first row where the lights were. But, no, that seemed unlikely since I was now in the dark, not visible and no one, either in the gallery or the stage, showed even the faintest sign of any acknowledgement of my presence.

  Applause broke my train of thought, the wave of cheers came from behind me, from my left and my right, even from my front, meeting in a swirl where I was seated, breaking up into eddies and currents, churning, the froth and the foam drowning whatever doubts I might have had. The stage lights dimmed and the first performer walked in to an announcement on the microphone, so scratchy and loud, whining with the feedback from the machine, that I couldn’t make out a single word.

  A thin wiry man, his eyes narrow, his hair straight, he was wearing a white shirt and black trousers and a long white overcoat complete with a bowler hat, he had a Charlie Chaplin moustache and even his trousers had that loose, ill-fitting feel, crinkled at the knees and bunched near the toes. Face deadpan, his moustache kept twitching as if it had a life of its own. His feet doing a continuous trot, jump, shuffle, he took a bow and, to a drum roll, four clowns came onto the stage, all dwarves, reaching barely to the man’s knees. They circled him, kept pointing to him and laughing.

  From where I sat, right in front, I could see the colour of the costumes the clowns wore had faded, the paint on their face was rough and cracked, light in some places and dark in others. One clown turned his back to the audience, made a gesture as if he would pull his trousers down, sending the crowd again into rapturous applause.

  Then, from his trouser pockets, one in front and one behind, Clown 1 took out four coloured balls and tossed them at the man, who lurched forward and began to juggle them in the air. Within minutes, a second clown, Clown 2, tossed another ball at Juggler who thus had to deal with five and then Clown 3 joined in, then Clown 4 and Clown 5 until Juggler was moving fast and furious, the music loud from the balcony, Juggler keeping eight balls in the air, his moustache twitching all alo
ng, when suddenly everything slowed down including the tempo of the music and a hush fell over the audience at the sight of another clown, Clown 6, walking onto the stage holding a blazing torch – a piece of cloth soaked in kerosene tied around what looked like a short bamboo pole – in one hand and a stack of giant steel rings on his other arm.

  The Juggler, too, had slowed down, the balls still in the air but now moving perceptibly slower as if the air itself had become thicker, more viscous. Clowns 1 to 5 were now sitting in a ring on the stage around Juggler, making faces of worry, arching their eyebrows, nodding their heads, pulling their lips, resting their chins on their palms, as if they were thinking, as if they were contemplating what Clown 6 would do. This mock concern made the crowd titter but there was no mistaking a certain tension in the air.

  Clown 6 started to hurl one ring after another at Juggler, each ring about four feet in diameter, each ring so accurately thrown that it fell over Juggler’s head, slid down his chest, and the moment it reached his waist Juggler began to sway faster and faster to keep the ring from sliding down to his feet, all this while still balancing the eight balls in the air.

  Clowns 1 to 5 now stared at Juggler with exagger-ated amazement, as he twirled his waist to keep the rings in the air, twirled his arms to keep the balls from falling to the floor, tilted his head to balance both, shuffled his feet, until he became a blur of movement, his face, his head, his neck, his shoulders, his chest, his waist, his legs, his knees. The crowd was on its feet now, cheering the man who could juggle horizontal, vertical, circular, sideways, up and down. And when some people from the gallery began shouting to him to stop because just watching him was making them giddy, Clown 6 walked up to the front of the stage, sneaked up from behind Juggler, thrust the flaming torch to his feet, and set his trousers alight.