The Storm

by Arif Anwar

  “Are we going home now?”

  “Yes, but I have to make a quick call first.”

  He fortifies Anna with quarters for the vending machine, and after installing her in front of one, steps outside.

  Faisal Ahmed picks up on the first ring.

  “Shar. I’m glad to hear from you.”

  “You’ll never guess where I am,” Shar says.

  “Uh, okay . . .”

  “The DC Bangla School.”

  “The DC . . .”

  “I’m surprised you don’t recall. We first met here just a month ago. You struck up a conversation with me. Remember?”

  A tinge of irritation enters Ahmed’s voice. “Right. Of course I do. Shar, I really don’t see how this is germane to what we were discussing the last time we spoke.”

  “I asked them about you. And your name doesn’t appear on the member list.”

  “That’s probably because I’m not a member.”

  “You’re not?”

  “No. And I never said I was. You don’t have to be a member there to enjoy their facilities.”

  “Then how do you explain that the boy who you said was your son doesn’t even know who you are?”

  “What did this boy look like?”

  Shar describes him.

  “There were two boys playing that day. Did you ever think that you approached the wrong one, Shar?”

  He did not, so he reaches into his quiver for his final arrow—confronts Ahmed with everything he learned from Niten about him.

  Ahmed sighs when he finishes. “Shar, that’s quite a conspiracy theory you’ve drawn up based on very circumstantial evidence. I’ve helped thousands of people over the years. People who were asking for nothing more than to escape a desperate situation or have a chance at a better life. Katerina can provide you with a whole list of individuals, families even, that you can talk to if you don’t believe me. And as for Cummings, sure, I probably did meet him at some fundraiser or another, but I go to several of those a year.”

  “You’re right in that I don’t believe you.”

  “Need I remind you that it was you who asked for my help when I told you I was an immigration lawyer?”

  “My name and profile are up on the IPD website. You guessed that I was Bangladeshi and stalked me to the Bangla School.”

  Ahmed laughs. “You’re in the wrong line of work, Shar. Someone of your imagination should become a writer. I’m going to hang up now. When you come to your senses, you know how to reach me.”

  JEREMY greets him at the door when they arrive at Anna’s house, an hour following his conversation with Faisal Ahmed.

  “Hey,” Shar reaches out and they exchange a stiff handshake. Jeremy is in a navy-blue suit, the tie loose around an unbuttoned collar.

  “Val and I were wondering if we could have a quick chat. Anna, honey, can you go up to your room? Shar will be up to tuck you in soon.”

  Shar follows him into the living room. Val is sitting on the sofa, in work clothes also—a striped blouse and a pencil skirt. She stands up when the two enter, lending more formality to the proceedings.

  “Hi, Shar.”

  “Hi.” He takes a seat on the single wingback chair. Jeremy joins Val at the sofa. The configuration makes him feel like a couple’s therapist.

  She wastes little time on pleasantries. “What’s going on with the visa situation?”

  He thinks back to the conversation with Ahmed this afternoon. His last real option. “It’s not looking good.”

  Val has taken to wearing glasses over the past few years. Black, slim-framed ones that she peers over now, her gaze pin-sharp.

  “What about getting enrolled in another study program and staying on as a student?”

  “I have to leave the country first to get a new student visa. And that’s not a guarantee either. I can’t afford to live here without a job indefinitely.”

  “Can’t you just stay back then?”

  “Illegally, you mean?”

  “Whatever you want to call it. You wouldn’t be the first to do it.”

  He enumerates all the risks associated with that option, listing the disadvantages the way Faisal Ahmed had explained to him.

  Val sits back in the sofa. Jeremy—leaning forward with his elbows on his knees—complements her. It all looks oddly right in that moment to Shar, the two of them fitting together like lock and key.

  “I think we’re ignoring the elephant in the room here,” Jeremy says.

  “No,” Shar says, surmising his meaning instantly. “No. We can’t. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Think about it,” Jeremy says. “You two have a child together. You have history. It won’t be hard to convince the government that it’s a real marriage.”

  Val turns to him, her face unreadable. “You’d be okay with it?”

  Jeremy laughs, wryly. “Provided it’s temporary, of course. I’m sorry, babe, I should have run it by you first. It just popped into my head now. You and I can keep things discreet. I think you and Shar would have to show things like a joint bank account, a shared address. I haven’t thought it all the way through. After Shar gets his green card, the two of you can get a divorce.”

  Val and Jeremy look at each other; something passes between them, a Rubicon breached, a decision made and communicated in the unspoken language of couples. They nod and turn to him.

  “I . . . I don’t know what to say,” he stammers.

  Val is looking at him intently. “Do you want to stay?”

  He reaches deep in himself for the answer and is satisfied with what emerges as the unvarnished truth. “I’ve made my peace with the past. I want to stay. But how is this going to affect the two of you?”

  “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Jeremy says. “It’s not just about us. It’s about Anna.”

  Zahira

  Calcutta, India

  AUGUST 1946

  Zahira walks to the back of the house, where Motaleb is to meet her. In a nod to disguise, she has marked the space between her brows with a large red circle, but has not changed her clothes apart from wearing her sari in the looser, more billowy style of an upper-class Hindu woman.

  More than an hour has passed since Inspector Nandi left, and since she and the driver arrived at an important decision regarding Rahim’s rescue. The dark has descended fully outside in the meantime, the night blooming into life around them.

  At the foot of the stairs that terminate in the rear courtyard, Motaleb blinks at her in the murky light. Earlier, he argued vehemently against her accompanying him to meet the abductors, citing the dangers and risks inherent, but relented once he saw how adamant she was.

  “Begum sahiba, if I didn’t know who you were, I’d take you for the ginni of a high Brahmin household.”

  He says this even though he too has transformed, donning a dhoti as opposed to his usual trousers. With the thick streak of vermillion on his brow and an orange turban, he looks just like a Hindu man.

  “Don’t call me ‘begum sahiba,’ you fool, and enough of your sycophancy. It’s getting dark already, and I’m beginning to question the wisdom of all this.”

  “Evening is when the sadhus congregate at the ashram and smoke. This is the best time to go. Did you bring the ransom?”

  She shows him the bag.

  “Good.”

  INSPECTOR Nandi’s lone constable is posted at the main door, so they slip out the back gate, which opens into an alley, and hail a cycle rickshaw.

  Zahira stumbles climbing up onto it, the bag of ransom jingling in her hand; Motaleb hops up with a quickness that belies his age and tells the rickshawallah where they intend to go.

  The man, who has thinning hair and sunken cheeks despite likely being no more than thirty, gives a firm shake of his head. “Are you mad? Going into that neighborhood at this hour?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” asks Zahira.

  “A den of thieves and dacoits is what’s wrong with it. The best I can do is drop you a
few streets away.”

  “That’s fine. Just get us there quickly.”

  The man presses all of his meager weight onto the right pedal to push off, then the left. Zahira gives Motaleb a sideways glance. The old driver’s eyes are feverish in the dark, as though he wants to pull the rickshaw himself. As an alternative, he leans on the rickshawallah’s back as a jockey would a horse.

  She whispers to him. “You said you have an idea of who the abductors are, Motaleb. How is that?”

  “Huh? Oh.” He looks briefly lost. “I saw the tripundra on their foreheads. A sign of the Aghoris. A most dangerous cult, begum sahiba. Wrapped up in all manner of dark, unnatural things. I’ve heard that the gang roams about an ashram nearby Hungerford. With Direct Action Day tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised if whatever rogue sadhu these men patronize wants to start a ruckus.”

  “And kidnapping a rich Muslim man is the way to accomplish that? Most sadhus I’ve known are men of peace.”

  “Begum sahiba, do not be so quick to know what lies in the hearts of men. Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Brahma, Jew or Christian—it doesn’t matter your God. They say that too much faith ruins a man, but it is really men who ruin faith, always. A man enters a religion with his whole self, and all the putrid things that he brings with him, all the darkness. It infects the faith. The riots we’ve seen, the senseless killings, it’s not religion that is to blame, but the men who practice it.”

  “And where do we find these devious men of faith?”

  The sarcasm is lost on Motaleb. “If anyone knows of those goons, it’d be the people in the ashram. We will go in and ask questions—two devotees looking for words of wisdom from a baba.”

  “I’m having doubts, Motaleb. Inspector Nandi said—”

  “Begum sahiba, if we’re talking risk, what do you think is the greater threat to sahib? Us bringing the ransom to those who hold him, or arriving with a contingent of police?”

  The city is well in the arms of darkness when they turn into unfamiliar streets. Here, the alleys are lined with gnarled mango and lychee trees, behind them the boundary walls of old houses whose scabrous patches reveal the brickwork beneath. They loom like dead things, and in a snatch of thought, she wonders about the inhabitants of these homes, about the feet that pressed on their steps, the hands that pushed open the doors, their own secret histories of laughter and pain.

  They escape the knot of alleys to enter the mouth of a wide avenue. There is more traffic here—rickshaws with hurricane lanterns lighting their undercarriage and even the occasional car that rolls by. Two clearly intoxicated young men with their arms around each other’s shoulders catcall in Zahira’s direction and make an obscene gesture as they pass by.

  They disembark at a corner in Barabazar, at the southern end of which, under a cavalcade of lights, is the Sri Krishna Pramahansha Ashram. Ostensibly, the grounds are for worshippers of Kali but on occasion freelance sadhus—holy men who roam Calcutta and its surroundings and live off the kindness of the public—stop by to sit beneath the massive banyans and chat, smoke ganja and toss nuggets of wisdom to men and women who seek it.

  The yard is steeped in shadows when they step into it, the air inscribed with incense and ganja, punctuated by the twang of ektaras plucked. They melt into the crowds of men and women, rich and poor, going from tree to tree under which sit mostly male (and mostly naked) gurus with impressive dreadlocks, their bodies smeared with ash, glassy-eyed from ganja, facing parabolas of congregants and cronies.

  They pass by sadhus who represent different sects and factions within Hinduism, and Zahira is soon lost about the differences among them, until Motaleb begins to narrate: Here are the Vaishnavas, worshippers of Vishnu, their foreheads marked with a great U in white with a red dot in the middle; Shakti priests bearing only a red dot on their foreheads symbolizing the third eye, and Smartists, unbound to any one God, with a smear of ash on their faces, a painted Aum on their foreheads.

  “How is it that you know so much about the Hindu religion?” she asks as she recalls her own readings on the religion as a child, imprints that have faded with time.

  He gives her a shy smile. “I don’t know. I’ve always found their stories so fascinating. There is so much color in their faith.”

  She scans the surroundings. “We’ve visited every tree, but we haven’t see any men or sadhus that have the symbol on their forehead that you described. The tripundra.”

  Motaleb looks anxious. “That is odd. They told me they would be here. At this hour.”

  “What about him, Motaleb?”

  “Who?”

  She points to a knot of people. “There, the monk with the shaved head, in maroon robes. He looks as though he is hunting for a space. Do you not see him?”

  “He has the tripundra on his forehead?”

  “No, on his satchel.”

  “On his . . .”

  But she is already running to the monk before Motaleb can finish his question.

  “I beg your pardon, Baba,” she says when she reaches him and the monk turns.

  “Yes?” The man replies in English.

  She stammers, lost for words. The man is European, his clear blue eyes sparkling, lines radiating from a lean, strong face. And she can also observe that what she thought was the tripundra is another symbol entirely—a background of white composed of a solid rectangle rather than of three stripes, the red central circle proportionally larger than the one Motaleb drew earlier in the day.

  She points. “That symbol you carry, is it a flag?”

  The monk looks at it, makes a noise of pleased exclamation. “That would be the work of my apprentice. When bored, he will sometimes spend time sewing patches and symbols onto my satchel. This was a gift from him as I set out to visit Lumbini in Nepal, the birthplace of the Buddha. In threads of red and white, he thought to sew a flag of Japan on my satchel.”

  “I see,” she says, dejected.

  “I am sorry. Was it not the symbol you sought?”

  “No, Baba,” she says in a hushed and strained tone.

  “Years before, when I myself needed answers, a wise man told me to travel east, perhaps your answers lie there as well.”

  Her throat is dry. “East? You believe I should go there?” She thinks of home. East Bengal. She cannot help but look in that general direction.

  When no answer comes, she turns to find that the monk is nowhere to be seen.

  “Did you see him leave, Motaleb?”

  “Forgive me, begum sahiba. I was looking where you were. I didn’t understand what the two of you were saying.”

  Feeling eyes on her, she looks up and freezes.

  On the lowest branch of the banyan tree nearest to them sits a large raven, just like the one she encountered on the balcony in the morning. The body a black clot against the tree trunk, its large, wedge-shaped head is cocked toward them, the eyes lambent in the reflected lights of the ashram.

  It holds her gaze for a moment more before hopping off the branch. On a low, straight path it flies into the gloom that lies beyond the iron gates on the eastern side.

  Motaleb, mystified by her sudden catatonia, inquires, “What are you looking at, begum sahiba?”

  “Follow me,” she says.

  The ashram is large and soon she is running toward the gates, Motaleb a few steps behind, his breathing ragged.

  Reaching the gates, Zahira secures the bag of ransom under her armpit, grabs hold of the handle and twists. It takes most of her strength and an almighty shriek of metal-on-metal to loosen the bolt.

  They step into a small orchard shrouded in darkness, no larger than a plot of land for a middle-class home. The air here is warm and thick, exuded by the trees.

  She is about to tell Motaleb that perhaps they have made a mistake when there is the squeal of metal again. Three men enter and close the gate behind them. The man at the head of the group is the tallest, his silhouette long and slender, his face obscured from the lights behind him. He stands and observes
before walking over in big strides. The other two linger at the gate, presumably to keep a lookout.

  Up close, she can see the knife scar on the man’s chin, the mark of the tripundra on his forehead.

  He smirks. “What’s this? Playing as devotees? You fool no one.”

  Later, she would marvel at the courage she finds to say what she does, having seen the long curved knife he wears on his belt, shoved into a leather holster. A Nepali kukri.

  “Neither do you. Where is my husband?”

  The man is amused by her bravado. “His fate is in your hands, literally. Have you brought the ransom?”

  She gives him the bag. He rifles through the stacks of notes inside, bites each gold piece.

  Eventually, he says, “This is only half of what we asked for.”

  “The rest you’ll get when you hand over my husband safe and unharmed.”

  The man yawns. “I can’t be bothered with all that. This will have to do.”

  He tosses his scabbarded knife to one of his comrades. “Take care of them. I’ll go deal with her husband.”

  Motaleb, who has appeared to be mesmerized by the proceedings, now releases a strangled cry. “That was not part of the agreement. You told me no harm would come to us.”

  The man continues to walk away. “Forgive me, but I’ve decided to keep your cut of the money. You should think hard before striking bargains with the likes of us.”

  Seizing a handful of Motaleb’s shirt, Zahira slaps him hard enough to make her hand ache. “You bastard. This is how you repay us?”

  Motaleb deflates against her fist, weeping. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I thought you two were leaving. I didn’t know what would happen to me, my family. I’ve run up so much debt gambling.”

  “Then you ask us. You ask!” She releases him and he collapses on the ground, clutching his chest and complaining that he cannot breathe. The other two thugs are advancing on them. One holds the unsheathed knife in his hand, gleaming in the moonlight. Their smiles are sadistic. She wonders what her fate will be. It occurs to her that she should scream, but even the act of opening her mouth seems to take forever.