by Ings, Simon
Kaneer follows all right.
With the full force of the Purushottam Express at his back, propelled from nought to sixty miles an hour by a wall of superheated vapour, Kaneer the human bullet traverses the shuffle-space between him and his brother faster than human nerves can carry the news into Abhik’s uncomplaining brain.
Knees first, a rider in mid-air, Kaneer catches Abhik’s torso between his legs. Coupled at the groin, the boys’ heads whiplash against each other, into each other. They are, by fractions of a second, the first victims of the second-worst rail crash in Indian history.
The boy’s skulls do more than shatter on impact: they explode. Their brains are liquid haggises whose meningeal skins are lacerated to chaff by shards of frontal and maxillary. The ballistic paths of a thousand bone fragments agitate the spewing and unbounded broth: a formula in which what was Kaneer can no longer be distinguished from what was Abhik.
Once, each boy’s brain was a forest, magical and sparkling. Each brain cell was a tree, with a taproot for incoming news and branches spread to pass its ‘I am’ to its neighbours. Now both forests fall through the same chipper and out the end comes something new: a turbulent spew, self-blending, a seething soup of single cells. The force of the blast has sent each brain cell spinning. Each cell is a brush, rapidly whirling, a Tesla device, a friction-maker, a halo of spinning bristles. The cells revolve and touch each other, and as they contact, they spark. Something new is being made here. The boys’ minds, sea-changed, spin and whirl into a second life.
As one they bloom; as one they see. They see Vinod hurled the length of the carriage. He tumbles like a doomed parachutist. His left hand strikes a wire luggage rack. With his full weight behind it, here’s force enough to spit his fingers into the air – onetwothree! – as though he’s plunged his hand into a mincer. The bulk of him, ballistically driven, passes over the rack. His arm, firmly snagged, buckles in a hundred places before it comes away, waving and spitting like a different order of life, an anemone browning in the hot vapour of collision.
The carriage, punched into the air, turns end over end and for a split second it seems as though Vinod is stationary: the tumbling car’s centre and pivot. Then the carriage collides in mid-air with the car in front of it and everything buckles. The illusion is broken. Vinod is sucked into a bench-seat as it folds and the halves of its frame scissor his flailing stump. Heat washes through the carriage, cauterizing the wound. The carriage splits in two and Vinod’s half plunges end-on through the roof of car number eight, instantly killing half a dozen. Slowly the carriage topples over, crushing almost everyone else in the car. Cloud-borne, the Nankar twins marvel to see how Vinod, encased in the seat, survives the impact.
(Vinod, enveloped by the sandwiched seat, smells seared meat. The disaster is barely seconds old: too new for his mind to register. As far as Vinod is aware, the train is still becalmed outside Firozabad, the Nankar twins are seated on their bench, and he is standing before the open door, looking out at the night, the embankment, the road. It seems to him that a great, scratchy tongue has curled out of the dark and wound him into a hot, close, savoury space: the mouth of a cat.)
The twins’ bodies are chopped wreckage by now: smoke-curls and fragments of char, roiling in a spinning metal maze. Theirs is a bodily annihilation so abrupt, so comprehensive, it leaves the boys agape at their own extinction. But who needs flesh? Not Kaneer, not Abhik. They are literally disembodied: interpenetrating clouds of pink steam. A nova seen double through a gravitational lens. They bob and tremble on the edge of a shock wave that even now hurls them out of the open mouth of the sundered carriage and into the night.
Vaporous, expanding constantly, the twins flow through new conductors, race each other down whipping wires, dance thillanas through a businessman’s mobile phone, play demolition derby round the looped infinity of a pair of spectacle frames, and trace the rills and saddles of a foil sandwich wrapper. Distributed and dispersed, they comprehend the disaster around them in all its fullness, while the maimed and the dying have barely had time to notice anything amiss.
A woman without legs flies by, clutching beaded bags. It is Pali, Rishi Ansari’s wife, off to New Delhi to promote her district’s bangles and kangans, chandelier ornaments and cut-glass figurines. Of course, Kaneer and Abhik do not know who she is. They are not yet gods. They see only a determined businesswoman, her mouth scrunched with disappointment, her hands tight around the handles of bags which are themselves samples. See the finish! Feel the quality of the stitching! But the blast has ripped through her wares as comprehensively as it has ripped through her thighs, and her treasures spray out behind her through smoking rents: rivers of glass.
The Nankar twins watch the rivers twine and sparkle half-seen against the stars. They stare and, staring, lose themselves in toils of reflected light, refracting and recombining as the hot and close-packed shards smash into each other, rendering themselves down to powder. Pali’s bangles, her district’s labour, the bitter fruit of whip-backed hours, the pride of eyes gone yellow from the scarring of a hundred thousand glass flecks – it is a rainbow, or it would be, were there light enough to see.
The boys hang in the air, holographed in glass: their new home. The rainbow flexes. The rainbow lives. The rainbow wriggles through the air like a snake. It runs like a blindfold across Pali’s eyes as she tumbles, scraping her corneas to a fine translucence: she does not see the tangle of steaming metal that waits for her as she begins her descent. The rainbow flexes, dashes, roils. Riding the heat of the collision, it surfs away from the railway, the Kalindi and Purushottam Expresses.
Tacking back and forth, it finds at last a stable cushion of warm air along which to flow. Like a varicose vein, the Sher Shah Suri Marg runs over the land, raised on earth embankments. Warmth rises, even at this late hour, from its metalled top.
Meanwhile, at the Yadav Brickworks outside Chhaphandi, not ten miles away, the Lohardaga girls have gathered, nervous and disoriented, on the edge of the compound. They know nothing of the railway accident: they are being kept awake by a more proximate calamity. The geometry of their home has been disturbed. Where is the Nankar family’s hut? Where are the Nankars? What are these lights in the sky? Above their heads, halfglimpsed in the roiling flash of oil-drum fires, the rainbow skips, agitated, around the perimeter of the work camp. The Nankar twins are looking for their home. They are looking for their mum and dad. Something terrible has happened. What? Fine grains of glass cascade from the sky. The girls, cursing the smoke and embers, wipe their eyes as unseen supernatural forces read the secrets from their frightened hearts.
Beyond the kilns and out towards the river, a fickle tributary of the sacred Yamuna, the criss-crossing tracks and paths of the brickworks give way at last to channelled mud and weeds, cowpats, discarded fence posts and broken kerb stones, screes of woodchip and pebbledash. Among the trash left from the factory’s construction there is a pit, newly dug and newly filled, and overlooking the pit, a saffron-yellow Komatsu. Its engine is warm. The pit is warmer: wisps of labile smoke rise from a crumble of burning tyres.
Even gods would have a hard time sifting evidence from the smeared and crumbled leavings buried here, crushed beneath so much rubble, scoop upon scoop of river gravel and bails of rusted barbed wire. But Kaneer and Abhik smell their kin well enough. They flex as one above the pit in an agony of loss. Mummy! Daddy! The Nankar boys are home.
The rainbow flexes in the air, swelling, stretching, deforming. It haloes the ground, a screaming mouth. Its needle teeth glisten in the dark. It’s only a child. It’s only two children, hugging each other against the dark. They’re lonely. They’re lost. They’re dead. What comfort for them now?
They loop back to the only home they know: mud walls and corrugatediron roofs and dogs. The compound is asleep. Their hut is a disordered, kerosene-drenched heap of mud, straw and ash: very few clues remain here to remind them of their life. The bowl of a frying pan; the handle’s burnt away. Scorched and
shrivelled scraps of green polyester: it was their mum’s only good kameez. Potatoes. Now, this is a puzzle. Potatoes? They haven’t seen a potato for days. Round here, and under Vinod Yadav’s vindictive rule, potatoes have been a weekly luxury for the Nankar family. What are all these potatoes doing here? Handsome, fresh, blemishless baked potatoes, their insides soft and creamy, their skins crispy under a smothering of fat – what fat? White fat. Lard. Mummy...
The twofold djinn spins together a scenario of unspeakable, sickening horror, then jackknifes away from the ruined hut, repulsed by its own powerful imagination.
Marking the southern boundary of the compound, half-hidden behind piled pallets and rolls of rusty, half-unravelled chain-link, there’s an old forty-foot shipping container, ‘MOYSE’ still just about readable on its flank. It’s the only secure structure on the site, the only corner of that busy desolation where they are guaranteed some peace. They need space to breathe. To come to terms. They need to understand what they are. The boys unravel and fan in under the lip of the padlocked door.
Among old buckets, tools, drums of fuel oil and kerosene, bottles of paint-stripper, turpentine and white spirit, the boys curl around themselves, each the other’s nest, and whisper stories in the dark. And for a while, they are comforted. These tales, at least, are familiar. ‘The Qazi of Jaunpur’. ‘Wangu and the Lion’. Folklore from a land since pocked with breeze blocks and landfill. But it’s a limited repertoire and very soon exhausted.
They try spinning new tales out of old, but story-time’s a luxury almost unheard of in their little lives; they’re only young and bricks are all they really know.
It goes like this: Wangu is the oldest man in the village and he cannot bear to see anyone happy.
No, like this: Wangu finds good, loamy clay soil from the side of a hill.
How about this? Wangu just wants more money, more land, more sheep. He knows to avoid old stream beds and flood plains and digs a hole in the ground four feet long by three feet wide by three feet deep. When day dawns he has wandered far, far away from the valley of the stone lion and he fills the hole with water.
No, no.
Like this, then: When day dawns he swings his legs over the rail and plucks the brick from his mother’s grasp. It is an ordinary yellow house brick, poorly made, porous as a sponge. He folds it in his arms and falls into the water.
Something has happened. Something important. But the transition from the old, familiar shipping container to some other, quite alien, storyspace is so abrupt and so seamless it takes the boys a moment to realize the enormity of it. For a little while they read their old surroundings on to the new: Pink jellyfish: paper dishcloths. Darting crabs: rats. Rocks wrapped in gold weed: sacks of cement. Then, looking up, they see that the roof of the container is turned to sea and the silver undersides of waves plash their glassy sides with bluing light.
The boys rise cased in ice, infused with wonder. What is this place?
This landscape’s so strange it might have leaked from someone else’s dream. Land made of ice. Ahead of them a dark fang punctures the grey horizon. Foyn. They walk and walk. They stumble into puddles, shield their eyes, suck buttons torn from their coats to keep their thirst at bay. They wear felt boots. They carry axes, pistols. Now here’s a story worth the telling, a boy’s adventure tale, if only they can.
The blow is so fast the boys don’t even see it coming. Howling, swiped out of story-time, they flex into the air, fleeing white bears, smashed ice, and the red ruins of strange men.
Buoyant, briefly becalmed, the boys take stock. Somehow, they’ve fallen through the skein of things. How it happened is a question that can wait. Now all that matters is, how on earth are they going to get home?
They spin and spin, but there’s no traction here, no headway, they are adrift. Is this it, then? Is this the end? They’re only children. Little. They’re aghast. How can stories end in such a way? Where’s the moral? Where’s the justice? Brought up on old tales, and precious few of them, they’re unprepared for this. The way lives churn and churn, going nowhere, just frothing time into what might have been.
At the eleventh hour, a rescue. A wrecked and flapping bladder happens by, a plaything of the air. A complex fabric bag, sheened with aluminium paint. Now, this is new. Pure Jules Verne. Shit-kickers they may be, but they’re boys, and know of Nemo. Once, stumbling on some distant village fair, they snuck in under the tent wall to watch. James Mason in white polo-neck, Kirk Douglas in red stripy T. Ever afterwards, for as long as they were flesh, they carried the marks of their transgression. A scar above Kaneer’s right eye. Abhik’s cauliflower ear. A movie’s not for bhangi kids.
Well, look at them now! Squealing with joy, the boys wriggle round the stricken airship’s balloonettes and grid themselves along its flexible metal skeleton. There are men here, survivors of the first crash, but marooned now. Lost men. Dead men. One, despairing, leaps, embracing chilly dark and death.
Furiously, the boys work to keep the airship afloat. Snatches of the film return to their powerful and twofold mind and they use it to plug the airship’s holes. Kirk Douglas crouches by a gap in the wall, looking out into the Arctic night, hunting in vain for some last-minute, third-act solution. James Mason lies across a mat of muscle-red tarpaulin, greeting the tragic failure of his ship with dignity and cigarette. Mutters: ‘Should have stuck to submarines.’ Mason’s a reassuring name for these kids: kids whose clay- and mica-blotched skins once glittered greenly in the dusk like week-old fish. Mason’s swarthy, flattened looks make him every inch a Nemo, too. Prince Dakkar, son of the Rajah of Bundelkund, who plundered sunken galleons for gold and preyed on British ships to fuck the hated Empire up...
The boys will spin this story out for as long as they can, they’re learning fast, they’re getting good at this, but narrative logic demands that what goes up must come down. The shattered airship will crash again – and finally, this time. The ship must crash...
But the winds do not stop in their courses and the oceans do not cease to turn, and the bag, a ruined, wheezing lung, flies higher, higher, hits a slipstream, bends, deforms, stretches and shreds, its luggage spilled, its Nemo hurled without complaint to earth, roll-up sparking in his claywhite fist. World-wrapping winds whip shreds of fabric bag round and round the earth and drop them, years later, on a barren hill.
I T A L I A
The boys slither over dry, smashed rock, dizzy with adventure. They have no idea where they are, or when, but they are beginning to grasp that geography matters less to them than it matters to the living. They make their own journeys with the stories they tell. They fashion – somehow, they don’t yet know how – their own escapes. They survived a barren and virtually unpeopled Arctic: they’ll make a story of this place too. Stories are their breath. Their food. Their blood. And they’re getting stronger.
On the hill opposite, perched in a shadowy defile, a wounded officer of the Sultan’s Desert Regiment blinks, sun-dazzled, as letters spill and blur across the shattered wastes, into the defile and up, unseen, towards his heart and brain.
The boys bed in, tense, waiting for the crash, the screaming plummet, the blow from the monstrous white bear. (For all they know, it’s their presence brought such ill-luck on their former host.) But nothing bad happens: just a stumbling descent on one good leg to the town and the shore and the motorboat. David Brooks rides in the prow, watching a pod of dolphins. He wonders why he feels so nauseous, who never had a day’s seasickness in his life. The boys, winding boisterously around his guts, fight for the view afforded by his eyes.
The aeroplane ride to the southern city of Salalah is exhilarating, though the Skyvan’s interior is cramped and smelly and not nearly as comfortable as the airship. Riding in the Land Rover with David Brooks and Edward Turnhill brings them back to territory with which they are almost familiar: dust, rock, broken concrete, jerry-rigged phone and power lines. It’s when they get to the palace that things begin to fall apart. This David man’s no
hero, it turns out. He’s come to steal a kingdom. No hero hides behind a gun, a uniform. No. The boys will none of him. They’d sooner tease the old man’s parrots.
When they look up from their play, David has gone. Turnhill and the Sultan have gone. The palace is deserted.
The palace doors are open. One by one the Sultan’s birds flump their way towards the great outdoors. Funnelled to an unlikely height by the strange, reverse vertigo of once-captive birds, the parrots spiral over their palatial home, up and up, until they hit a cold layer, whipping counter to the sea fog’s flow. Airs of different temperatures and densities do not mix. They rub against each other and waves form along the join. An inverse wave, like a great tongue, scoops the birds up into the cold layer and the wind flings them, bright as rockets fired from Nemo’s ship, out over the ocean.
Around noon the next day a lump of something, a rough parallelepiped, yellow as a cheap housebrick, drops out of the Indian Ocean’s blue empyrean and lands on the roof of a forty-foot-long shipping container. The container is one of eight lashed to the hatch covers of a small Chinese-built cargo ship called Malacca Queen. Bricked in ice, deepfrozen, Sultan Said’s second-favourite parrot (a rare Senegal) shatters against the roof of the container and the container, ‘MOYSE’ stencilled on its side, rings like a bell. It’s empty – or may as well be, for what its contents are worth:
Wastepaper / US$100 TEU / 01 TEU.
Crouched in the dark between this container and the next –
MSKU7176658: Vehicles, cars, buses, trucks, lorries, motorcycles, bicycles, used.
– fifteen-year-old Egaz Nageen ducks. Gunfire ? RIB pilot, machete boy and look-out, Nageen is so far out of his comfort zone here he’s imagining all kinds of shit. His idea of piracy is sneaking aboard some Sydney tourist’s yacht while they’re busy getting pissed portside. He’s never clambered aboard so big a ship, never mind in mid-ocean.