Dead Money

by Srinath Adiga

  Next, an adobe house somewhere in a desert. A little girl with tattered clothes and frizzy hair, crying. Lying at her feet in a growing crimson pool, the body of an older woman. The girl walked aimless loops around the room, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the dusty floor.

  Then a helicopter view of a thick urban grid. An explosion, possibly a missile strike, sending up clouds of smoke. The camera swooped to the ground. The building was now a small mountain of bricks, smoldering like naan fresh out of a tandoor oven. A woman, disconsolate beside the rubble, the wail from her throat merging seamlessly with the scream of the ambulance that had arrived to collect the blood-splattered bodies.

  The montage switched to the next gear, images flashing quicker, the voice-over more impassioned as the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Then an aircraft carrier with a gaping hole in its side. The twisted exoskeleton of a red London bus. A ball of fire swallowing a Humvee on a desert road. A man kneeling on the ground, head bowed, hands tied behind his back. A sword came down on the neck before Sanjit could look away. He ran to the bathroom and emptied his stomach. A few moments later, he returned to the darkness of the living room. The video had been paused. Farid was looking at him and shaking his head. Sanjit glared and snatched the remote from Ali’s grasp.

  He pressed play and gritted his teeth, determined to watch the beheadings without flinching. Because he wanted to show them that he wasn’t a pussy.

  OVER THE NEXT few days, he had to sit through more of these videos: blood and gore wrapped in the same narrative of persecution and revenge, tailored to a Muslim audience.

  But as a non-Muslim, he was processing the images differently. Once he got past the initial revulsion, it was like porn. His body tingled from the thrill of violence and death one moment. Next moment, he felt a shame akin to that experienced after masturbation.

  But what was there to feel ashamed about? How was this any different to the buzz from watching an action movie? Granted, in movies, the actors didn’t die for real, blood was food coloring, and muzzle flashes were added in post-production. But wasn’t the basic principle the same? Celebrate violence. Put it on a pedestal. And why not? It was as much a part of human nature as love, anger or greed. Man discovered it long before he discovered the wheel or fire. It was in the fabric of our existence. The world came to being in the violence of a big bang and was going to end the same way.

  The more he watched the videos, the more he noticed the changes within him. His eyes were turning flesh to paper, blood to water, and smoke to air. The hardness from his face spread slowly to his chest and then his entire being. Soon, he was like an actor watching his favorite movies with a view to being in them.

  HATE. ANOTHER WORD that got bad press. Pity, because when you paused and thought about it, there was a certain beauty to it. Not beauty in the way you’d describe, say, a woman or some scenery, but perhaps a more profound definition based on its ability to generate transcendence.

  Man made fire because he hated darkness, cars because he hated walking, appliances because he hated chores. And now Sanjit needed to summon this transformative power, admittedly not for such a lofty cause as advancing civilization. But a cause that was important to him nonetheless.

  So how did you hate someone enough to want to kill them? Infidel Westerners slaughtering Muslims blah blah blah blah … That might work for Ali, but not Sanjit, for the simple fact that foreigners weren’t responsible for his disease. Life was. Worse, it didn’t even bother leaving a note explaining why, although God knew how many times he’d begged for it.

  Why me?

  And then one day, it struck him. He needed to rephrase his question slightly. Not why him. But why not someone else? He tried applying this simple tweak.

  He stood at the window, elbows on the sill, gazing at the rivulet of heads below, asking, “Why me; why not him? Or him? Her? Him? Him …”

  He followed the stream of humanity meandering between the low, discolored buildings, squinting as the bodies got smaller with distance.

  “Her? Him? Him? Him?”

  And then when he’d gone as far as his eyes could see, he closed them and imagined faces on the other side of the ocean: black, white, yellow, brown. Golden hair, red hair, brown hair, black hair. His lips pinching out the same words over and over, like a mantra:

  “Why not him? Her? Him? Him? Him?”

  With each chant, his jaw became harder. Before long, he was standing upright, arms by his sides, rage balling up in his fists, his chin and neck and stomach. It traveled down to the heart, filling all its empty chambers.

  Ali had been brainwashed to hate all Westerners, but Sanjit had gone one up.

  He was learning to hate the whole world.

  THERE WAS A third aspect to the training: preparing to meet God, or in Sanjit’s instance, Indraloka. This was where improvisation was called for. Luckily, Sanjit remembered the visualization exercise from his cricket-training days.

  He asked Ali to buy a Vedic chants CD and a portable disc player. When Ali arrived with the goods, Sanjit retired to his room. He lay in bed, eyes closed, music from the CD player oozing into his ears, the strings of the sarangi flickering like a candle flame. The chanting began. Three deep “oms” followed by a recital of ancient hymns, flat in the beginning, rising in the middle, a gentle slope at the end. Sanjit didn’t understand the words but its monotony was calming, like warm oil on skin. The mind stopped wandering. Thoughts manifested and disappeared like bubbles before they ceased altogether. He was in the sunless depths of a deep, deep sea, voices and the sarangi melding into one body before disintegrating into flecks. Then a burst of white light, crystallizing in a vision of Indraloka.

  He imagined a bellboy giving him a tour of his suite in the celestial resort: plush leather sofa, granite floor, a welcome hamper with dried fruits and wine on the chic coffee table. The big-screen TV on the wall was tuned to a cricket match, the minibar stocked generously with beer, liquor and soft drinks. “Free replenishment,” said the note on top of the fridge. He crossed the room and opened the sliding doors that led to the balcony.

  Beyond the railing, the ocean, bright as a gem, still as a lake. A soft breeze caressed his face, gently unhooking the curls from his ears.

  He gazed at this view, allowing its serenity to percolate his body, then went to the bedroom. The king-size bed was covered in a grey satin sheet, soft on the skin. Ditto for the pillows. The mattress was springy. The bellboy gave a knowing smile when Sanjit bounced on it.

  The bellboy directed him to another balcony, this one with a view of the pool. A girl lying on a deck chair lowered her Ray-Bans and looked at Sanjit. She was clad in a red bikini, her slim, tanned legs glistening with sun cream.

  “Come on,” she mouthed.

  One moment, he gestured, smiling.

  He held this vision in his mind. The suite, sun, sea, girl. Happiness, uninterrupted by anything: work, age, disease, time itself.

  The music in his ears tapered and he opened his eyes slowly, returning to the darkness of the room. He removed the headphones and sat up, body suffused with calm. Nothing escaped the attention of his finely tuned awareness: the drop of sweat prickling his earlobe, the ceaseless twitching of the nostrils pumping breath, the coarseness of the sheet under his palm. At once, he became aware of the pain, discomfort and suffering that underpinned earthly existence. Suffering he was going to say goodbye to.

  His eyes sliced through the darkness, seeking shapes, feeling corners. Then something tickled the insides of his nose. He rose and followed the scent to the living room. Ali and Farid were sitting on the floor, shoveling biryani into their mouths. Pretty much the only thing on the menu these days.

  Not that Sanjit cared. He’d lost interest in food, just like he’d lost interest in everything in the world. But he sat down and scooped a small mound of yellow rice and meat onto his plate.

  He was a soldier and needed to eat.

  16.

  HOW DID YOU KNOW YOU WERE
READY TO DIE? More to the point, ready to kill? Like anything, you could never be one hundred percent sure. But after a while you started to get a feeling: an itch to just get on with it.

  It had been three weeks since Sanjit had made the deal with the devil. In all this time, he hadn’t stepped past the front door of the tiny two-bedroom flat. With each passing day, the planet receded further to the edges of his consciousness. That morning, he had woken up with the smell of Indraloka in his nose, the sea; the beer; the perfume of the girl lying next to him, drawing circles on his chest. He mentioned all this to Ali at breakfast.

  Ali nodded, then looked at the half-eaten samosa in his hand, exclaiming how tasty it was.

  Sanjit inhaled sharply and stomped out of the room. Over the next few days, he was like a child in the backseat of a car, asking, “Are we there yet?”

  There was a good reason for this impatience. The disease. He hadn’t fallen in weeks. And it was hard to detect signs of wasting on a face plumped with lots of biryani and little exercise. But that didn’t mean the disease had slowed or gone away. It was there. He could feel its living, breathing presence in his flesh.

  “Clock’s ticking,” he said to Ali the following week. “I don’t want the mission jeopardized by the disease.”

  Ali nodded thoughtfully. Then he stroked Sanjit’s stubble with the back of his hand.

  “You need a shave,” he said.

  You need a shave. Hmph. Why don’t you shave yourself, Mr. Big Beard? Sanjit fumed as he stood at the basin and applied shaving cream.

  He grimaced to make one side of his face taut and dragged the razor across it. As the twin blades advanced through the foam like a snowplow, his forehead creased with a new worry: he’d be too sick to carry out his mission, and the deal would be off. All because Ali was sitting on his butt.

  The razor jerked in his hand, rupturing his skin. A scarlet bead appeared near his chin. He pinched the cut, smiling as a rivulet streaked down his neck into the hollow of the collarbone. Only blood. A fluid invested with way too much meaning. You could label it—A, B, O—but in the end, blood was blood, whether it was his or someone else’s.

  He turned when he became aware of a pair of prying eyes—Ali, staring through the open bathroom door. The two men looked at each other. Then Ali smoothed his beard and walked off.

  Later, Sanjit’s meditation was disturbed by loud, indistinct voices from next door. He removed his headphones and pressed his ear to the wall to eavesdrop. Sounded like Ali and Farid were in the midst of an argument, but he couldn’t discern what it was about.

  A few minutes later, Ali came to Sanjit’s room and placed a phone on the bed, an old Nokia with a cracked screen and scuffed keypad.

  “Time to say your goodbyes.”

  FOR A LONG while after Ali left the room, the phone sat on Sanjit’s palm like an unopened gift. The excitement at being able to contact the outside world had been all too brief, because he had no idea who he was going to call. Mother? Reshma? What was he going to say to them?

  “Just calling to say goodbye. Where am I going? Ahem. You’ll see tomorrow …”

  He felt a cramp of guilt when he thought about what they were going to go through. Especially Reshma. The stigma of being a suicide bomber’s fiancée would taint her for life, and for no fault of hers other than she happened to be unlucky in the arranged-marriage lottery. But it wasn’t his fault either, in the same way he hadn’t asked for this disease. They were both victims. And he could only do what one victim could do for another: commiserate. Hope that some kind man might be able to overlook that blot in her matrimonial record and marry her.

  As for his mother, well, he could picture the shock when the police and reporters would come knocking. She’d put on a show for them, for sure: weeping, wailing, beating her head, cursing the gods, cursing him. She was going to hate him for this humiliation, for sullying the family name. But he was fine with that. In fact, he prayed for it just as he prayed for Reshma to find a decent man, because this hate was going to help her get through this ordeal. Without it, she would fall apart.

  There were other people he could call: ex-colleagues, school friends, college mates, ex-girlfriends, cricket buddies. But he didn’t feel like talking to any of them. Neither did he feel the urge to indulge in the sorts of things people did on their last day on the planet: a big meal, a last fuck.

  He was quite content to lie in the room and reflect on a life that was in its final stretch. He recalled his earliest memory: he was a three-year-old, crying in Bhopal Railway Station. He remembered the scalding heat, the smell of diesel mixed with shit and urine rising from the track, a stinging slap from his mother when he wouldn’t shut up.

  The next memory in the slideshow was a dentist’s visit from when he was seven. He couldn’t remember the man’s face, just his big hands.

  Then he recalled the accident that nipped his cricket career in the bud: the surreal moment when he fell off the scooter and landed on his wrist. The sickening sound of a bone breaking, a dream shattering.

  He remembered coming home one day after college and finding his father’s lifeless body slumped on the sofa, the living room smelling of excrement.

  Then, of course, that day. The day he sat in a small, cold doctor’s office, hearing the words that no one wanted to hear.

  So was that the summation of his life—a montage of pain, sorrow, grief and disappointment? Surely, it couldn’t have been that bad. Of course it wasn’t. There were happy moments. Lots of them. But they were all soiled by a disease that made it impossible to look back at anything with fondness.

  Besides, if he was about to enter a world of eternal happiness, didn’t it make sense to reflect on everything he was going to leave behind?

  THAT NIGHT, SLEEP was impossible. Every time Sanjit attempted it, a fresh worry rose in his mind. Before going to bed, he’d carefully studied the instructions in the Afterlife Welcome Pack. Upon arrival in Yamaloka, he had six hours to visit the bank. Judging from the map, it looked pretty straightforward: turn left at the arrival hall, walk straight past the shops, follow the signs to the end of the corridor. You couldn’t miss it, the brochure said. At the bank, it would take a few minutes to confirm his soul’s electromagnetic signature. Once the formalities were complete, he’d receive a card that would allow him to access his money. Three hundred thousand Afterlife Dollars. All his.

  Sounded simple. Of course, anytime you thought something was simple, it usually turned out to be anything but. He recalled somewhat apprehensively the mix-up at the airport in Bangkok during his first overseas trip. Confused by the signs, he ended up in the wrong terminal, nearly missing his connecting flight to Bali.

  Were six hours enough if a similar mishap were to occur upon arrival at the afterlife? What if there was a problem with his soul’s electromagnetic signature? What if the ATM machine was out of order, or the courts of Yamaloka didn’t take cards? What if the bank staff were on strike? And then the task of finding someone to represent him in the courts of heaven. Was it like the family court in Bandra East, he wondered? Lawyers in black gowns squeezed into tiny kiosks along the pavement, hammering away at their typewriters? How did you spot a good one?

  Questions, questions, questions. It was all part of the adventure, he told himself in an effort to ease his nerves. Death. The biggest adventure of his life.

  Finally, he succeeded in silencing his mind long enough to get something that resembled sleep, but just for a few hours as once dawn arrived, he was wide awake. He sat up and looked out the window, peering out into the world he was about to say goodbye to. The streets were shrugging off another night: milkmen pedaling their bicycles, vendors cutting open bundles of newspapers, readying to distribute them in the neighborhood. The panwaalas opening their shutters. The wind from the Arabian Sea bearing an unpleasant smell. The same thing every morning. The complacent rhythm of a complacent city. But even if this was beginning like just any other day, it wasn’t going to end like one.

 
Because of him.

  People were going to call him all sorts of names: terrorist, madman, deranged killer. But here’s what they’d forget in their haste to vilify him: that you couldn’t kill something that had an afterlife. Death was supposed to be the cessation of life, not a continuation in another form. Depending on how you saw it, we were all already dead or alive. Terms like life and death then became just meaningless markers on this continuum.

  But never mind if you couldn’t understand such nuances or care about them. Because in small corners of the world, people were going to celebrate his deed. They’d fire AK-47s in the air while chanting his name: Shahid Sanjit. Someone would post a video on the internet about how another blow had been dealt to the Western infidels. Not that he cared about all that nonsense, either. Right then, as the morning was spreading over the city, he could only think of one thing. That day, June 7, would be inextricably linked to him. He was going to own it forever. Just like those nineteen men who owned September 11.

  17.

  THE CAR MOVED SLOWLY, LIKE A SUBMERGED animal, through the backstreets of Colaba. Behind the low buildings, the Taj Mahal Hotel cast its early afternoon shadow over an aging neighborhood.

  In the backseat, a deadly weight hung off Sanjit’s shoulders: fifteen kilograms of RDX, ball bearings and nails, packed in a vest, ready to be detonated by the switch that hung inside his loose shirt.

  Ali placed a hand on his back, running through last-minute instructions: “Be relaxed. Act normal. Walk into the bar as if you’re going to get a drink. And remember, no eye contact with anyone.” Nothing Sanjit hadn’t heard before. He nodded through the cacophony of fear, nervousness, excitement and anticipation. Focus, he said to himself.