Fire in the Unnameable Country

by Ghalib Islam

  Come along, Niramish tells one lunch hour, his mixed vegetal odour a constant warning to others to stay away, but a friend to Hedayat since at school he is the only one who will tolerate his silence. Niramish’s own two problems: first the smell of mixed curry vegetables stuck to yellow turmeric fingertips, effusing from clothing, detectable from a hundred feet away. Niramish Khaja, loyal companion, smelly child: it never bothered little Hedayat the slightest, and, in fact, he interpreted the constant smell as an augury of the future, as if it were an odour destined to grow thicker in time. Niramish’s second problem: narcolepsy. In a stumbling sentence, halfway through his response to the teacher’s question, sitting or standing up, even poised in his characteristic loping gait, in the schoolyard or in the cracked-mirror streets, anywhere without warning, he would fall into a stertorous nod, his head would slip and his double chin would quadruple, before the snoring sound came out and came out and out until someone pinched his nostrils, wake up, Niramish, wake up, smelly child.

  Hai, did it happen again, he would re-emerge with a loud snort.

  Niramish, good-natured Niramish, a nutritious and well-meaning friend, would one day provide Hedayat with the perfect excuse. See him: running running toward the prize. Look, he shakes the tree, they fall to the ground, and he lifts them up out of the dust mound to see. And then the fire and the howling at these strange clusters of nectarines. A mere ten steps away, Hedayat is thrown back by an unnameable force and aside from a minor bruise on his forehead appears uninjured at first. You might say it was in consolation for his friend Niramish, who loses his right eye as well as three fingers of his right hand, pointer middle ring, and/or for the added reason of rebellion against father and father-prescribed humanity; whatever the case, Hedayat finds his hands curled up into hardened talons, unable to bend his thumbs and besotted by the added difficulty of fully working the digits of both right and left hands.

  Doctors who probe observe take samples of the tendons bones nerves interstitial tissues conclude, nothing wrong, Shukriah Ma’am, seems altogether like a psychological matter.

  The psychos, meanwhile, suggest all manner of cures, from hypno to shock therapy to antidepressant medication, all of which my mother refuses what we need is gently to pry open his mouth, she insists, this and nothing more, doctors sirs. Whether the loss is a rational decision or an effect of the blast no one can decide until Hedayat, too, forgets, content to take multiple-choice examinations since his writing appears to teachers like a private hieroglyphics, and not altogether worried about the future.

  Eyeless-fingerless-eyepatched and the other finger-gnarled, Niramish and Hedayat form quite the pair. During trips to Confectionarayan Babu’s candy shop, they stand in the shadows of the crowding children, the fat smelly pirate and his friend with talons and twisted hands, crackling laughter, whoops and hollering: they are the butt of all the mobile playground’s jokes. Narayan Khandakar, meanwhile, or Confectionarayan Babu, as he is known to everyone, is a gentle creature, and when the cete of badgering children leave after making purchases or get caught up in lights and buttons of arcade games, he invites, psst come on, you two, not out of pity or even to favour the son of one of his closest friends, Mamun M, but out of a spontaneous fatherly love, and pulls the string of the incandescent bulb in the cellar stairwell, and from dark corners the light spreads into bright shapes, the yellow fruits that break apart spilling candied seeds, the blue sugar packets that make you froth rabid at the mouth, the sweet toothpaste meant for eating, Confectionarayan Babu’s many succoured potables, his bars and candies of all shapes.

  That box over there, he never bestows a favour without first requesting they lend a nominal hand: please push it to this here.

  Though Hedayat is more or less crippled at such tasks, he leans with his weight against his elbows against the box.

  Here, let me do it, his friend remains better equipped despite the damage of the exploded nectarines.

  Never are they allowed more than one bowl or handful of candied almonds, but none of the other children are allowed to drink from the gushing fountain that feeds the vending receptacle for iced drinks or to try the newest American chocolate bars; just being in that wonderworld is tantalizing enough.

  Most important for Hedayat, he provided foil to his father/ there couldn’t be two individuals more dissimilar; Mamun M was perennially preceded by a sorrowful tune while Confectionarayan, with his round ball body and insatiable sweet tooth, was every chocolatier’s test subject and never had a sad word to say about anything. Confectionarayan added questions to the son’s mind: Don’t be so hard on your old man, he would say, he’s not a bad man, and if you only knew, boy, what subterranean hallways he’s seen, what a thoughtreel looks like.

  Narayan Khandakar and my father would chatterbox in Xasan Sierra’s cigarette shop, talking talk and playing cards in enclosed urban tin hut eat Saturday night meets Sunday morning, and Hedayat knew he knew the man and trusted the sweet seller’s judgment.

  Only on one occasion did Hedayat and Niramish doubt Narayan Khandakar. Psst, come here, you two, he invited us one day with a whisper into a corner of his shop we had never visited, where the light fell crooked onto boxes vessels jars of sweets whose brands we didn’t recognize. With a stepladder, he climbed to the top of a candy shelf and walked gingerly along its edge. He threw an errant candy bar at us, which Niramish caught. Then he reached into a region of piled confectioneries that ate his hands, and from that dark place, brought out a metal container before declaring aha, descending steps reappearing before his adopted nephews.

  Niramish and I, who had seen El Dorado in Narayan Khandakar’s candy shop, were underwhelmed by what looked like an oversized tuna can. What’s this, Niramish touched its smooth reflective hull. What’s that, he pointed. Boys, Confectionarayan Babu beamed, I present to you my most prized possession, my greatest asset in all the world, a thoughtreel.

  A thoughtreel, Niramish said, incredulously, as Hedayat moaned softly, alone, wondered what Confectionarayan Babu would do next; our uncle opened the canister and showed us its contents, a magnetic reel like the kind in cassettes and videotapes. A thoughtreel, he repeated, though alas, I have no way to listen to it.

  No thoughtplayer, Niramish mocked, no thought stereo.

  No, Confectionarayan said crossly, simply, now if you will excuse me, he began shooing us with a nearby broom. Niramish and I were astonished because Narayan had never behaved that way with us, and eventually, Niramish, at Hedayat’s sullen insistence, changed his tone how much did you pay for it, Uncle. Boys, Narayan Khandakar sighed, I’m sorry I can’t answer your questions. I merely wanted to show you an heirloom I will order buried with me one day; hopefully by then I will have had a chance to listen to a human mind on magnetic reel.

  Thoughts, Niramish touched the metal hull, can you really tape a human mind.

  If you can record a voice, an image, Confectionarayan shrugged.

  Niramish and I wrestled with the notion of thoughts encased in metal skin, and we remained skeptical, agitated for so long Confectionarayan added that we ourselves could be mere flickers in someone’s mind. What do you mean, Niramish pointed around us at the ground, the ceiling and walls, mentioned the warmer than average temperature for this time of year. Confectionarayan caught his drift the material world, and nodded, yes, but isn’t your grandfather a thought if he’s that much, he asked, your great-grandfather but a moment of consideration if we remember him at all. Niramish and I stared and waited for him to continue, mesmerised: Poof, Confectionarayan Babu snapped, laughed the way grown-ups do when they think children don’t understand. Time turns you into space, he said without exaggerating, into two yards of earth, children.

  With his words, I leapt from Confectionarayan’s candy store backward in time to the Archives, to row upon row of receptacles of magnetic reels storing recorded thoughts where my father’s wear and tear unto madness, though I knew nothing of that nightmare until that moment. Without asking us to, our uncle told u
s we began long before ourselves, and Hedayat moaned his displeasure as he stared at a dot in the farthest corner of the world, as he travelled endlessly toward that point, which he knew was Niramish and Confectionarayan Babu, his mother in her spidersilk dress, which was his grandmother’s slouch and steps, his father’s cynicism, and the soft five whispers of his sisters who were yet to be born, everything he had ever known and suddenly far away and ephemeral. He hovered above the floor, vertiginous.

  Narayan Khandakar retained his joyous welcoming character despite the incident, and the pair continued seeking refuge from the playground in the air and sights of the sweet cellar in their single-digit years, their mothers never quite at ease with their lingering hours, but Confectionarayan Babu always insistent they remain under his strict supervision and that a code of good behaviour always applied. It would be there that Hedayat would speak for the first time. This monumental change, however, would not have been possible had a stranger not come to town.

  The appearance of Mamun M’s mother and Hedayat’s grandmother Gita would be Hedayat’s benediction; her first revelation would be that it was the scent of her cooking he had detected on Niramish’s skin as augury.

  She arrived not like a survivor of torture or the perpetual contemplator of suicide, but donning a dark orange pair of sunglasses, which framed her cheekbones, and a silk neckerchief, which hid her stillexquisite collarbones, like the mother of a film star or playback singer. She had followed her son’s career alongside millions without knowing he was the selfsame Mamun, and had recognized him only many years later, changed by age, deflated by illness, in a surreptitious documentary that had been featured at Cannes but banned at home because its director was supposed to be dead, a recent Badsha Abd production she had watched at an underground film club in Victoria.

  It was your face for an instant as the camera panned the mirror streets, she told. I was absolutely certain and I kept the intersection in mind; in fact, it was not too far at all from where you live. I don’t know, Mamun shrugged, there are so many godforsaken movie productions in this town. Twice now, the past had shown up unannounced at his doorstep, undeterred by the viper’s nest of imperial occupation, and on this second occasion he acted as if he had been interrupted in the middle of his morning victuals by the paperboy.

  Shukriah, for her part, was as enthusiastic as she had been when Nur al-Din arrived with his basketful of crabs and his knapsack of melodies and his wanderlust, though this guest, she was sure, would rend no one’s heart. She also realized that, despite the old woman’s polished appearance, before her stood someone in search of a home.

  Quietly, she suggested the extension of her visit from three days to a week, from two weeks to a month: Why not help me took-taak in the hosiery shop, Amma, and Gita never refused these kind offerings.

  Over time, Shukriah was able to learn the reason for her visitation and the story of her life. It turned out that while Zachariah Ben Jaloun and his wife had not seen each other in almost twenty years, his records at the Ministry of Radio and Communications still stated Gita as his primary contact, since recall, as you may have heard, he had neither remarried nor found any stable friendships since coming back to that labyrinth of names. Two days after he put a bullet in the back of his head, my grandmother found thin meat slices in a duffle bag that had arrived without address of origin or deliveryman, in the shape of her estranged husband, with a knock on her front door one Thursday at lunchtime just as she was sipping her first spoonful of turkey broth. As his sallow chainsmoker’s face disintegrated in her hands, she realized she had been smelling onions since the moment she woke up that morning, and had found him in her sheets, in the clothing hamper, in the smell of every man’s sweat or cologne while shopping for the day’s eats. Gita realized she hadn’t distrusted the premonition for a moment, and rightfully so, so well had she and Zachariah known each other in life.

  Gita was so shocked by his return that she could not help but ask him the questions she had been muttering to herself for years.

  And our boy is lost now, she told him, perhaps dead, all grown up if he is alive, but probably a dacoit or a motorcycle pirate. Oh we failed, Zachariah, we utterly failed at love.

  After a simple burial attended only by two or three people who still remembered him, she began to feel a lightness on her feet, as if she had regained lost years by sending some furtive mass, which had weighed unseen on her Atlas shoulders, to the grave. She quit her freelance needlework and took a job as an operator for the national telephone company.

  And after many years there I thought it was high time for a living reunion with my only remaining family. How glad I am to know my son is alive and sharing a home with such a joyous woman and that he has a delightful son of his own.

  Shukriah did not press her mother-in-law to fill in the gaps of her narrative right away, presuming that time would complete that task, and told her only the best parts of her own life’s recent history, such as their early days in the small flat above the hosiery shop, the funny stories she would tell fetal Hedayat during her very long pregnancy.

  Eight years, my God, Gita exclaimed, you would expect him to be as large as a whale.

  This is around the time our head of state Anwar the Great reunites with Dulcinea, his love mare. My father insists on attending the magisterial funeral.

  Hurry up, he ushers the family into a waiting downstairs van. Labial flashes smiles energetic words pour, so hard with a whole family to travel, I hear him say, as the rise and fall of the driver’s hum of understanding, acceptance.

  The hum of the motor opiates me, summons sleep, and in between that time and the following scene, they encounter a rupture, an argument that would not heal for a long time. What I hear when I woke up: in front of his own mother, Shukriah shouts, and from that day onward, she refers to Mamun only by the self-reflexive pronoun himself: son, tell Himself to come now, that the table is set/ Himself is not the only eating member of the household what will Himself do about this outrageous gas bill, the old days money is not going to last forever/ is Himself ever considering another job, and so forth. When, out of habit, the more personal marker, you, falls, Shukriah’s lips replace the mistake immediately with Himself. Mamun M’s contrition is evenly matched by his stubbornness and his inability to utter the truth: he cannot stand the presence of his mother, as if her quiet footsteps throughout the house shake the cobwebs of older memories and return him to previous lives wrapped in spiderthread.

  What was Mamun M’s fantasy illness. His self-diagnosis of colon cancer had been proven otherwise by every sound individual of the medical profession except those keen on fleecing him for pharmaceutical expenses. Did he still believe he was mortally ill. Was he of the opinion that his mother would set back whatever recovery he had made. If so, why. The longer Gita stayed in their apartment, meanwhile, the more she began to feel as if her son had betrayed his spine. What was he doing all day while his wife ordered women’s linen from catalogues and managed a complex credit system that kept in mind all the customers who could not pay and others who paid partially and continued to haggle or to barter for even the smallest items, while she expanded the store’s inventory to include women’s and children’s clothing because times were so bad that one could not sustain oneself on the business of selling only hosiery.

  One day, while whipping cockroaches out of their hiding spots with a long black leather strap she had brought with her, Gita tried disabusing her son of his laziness. At first the lashes only reached the corner of the bed, and Mamun felt safe by the thought that a woman who had regained a son after missing him for nearly two decades would not could not. Nevertheless, he moved his body from out of the way of the attacks just to be sure. When the following lash discovered his neck, he leapt out of bed, shrieking with indignation.

  Attack me, then, strike your dear mother who bore you, she said as he shook with rage. And who wishes only the best, she lashed out again, this time catching him on a concha, the outer shell of his right
ear bursting with red; note that the whip was bona fide cowhide and fashioned to injure work animals.

  Shukriah found her spouse curled into a hermit crab’s shell, his head shielded with his hands, weeping like a child. She felt only pity at that moment and placed her own body between him and the instrument of torture, encircling him with her arms and drawing to his level on the floor.

  Enough, Amma.

  I was trying to, Gita lowered the whip, ashamed.

  I know, Shukriah forgave, and returned to calling Mamun by you. From that day forth, no one demanded that Mamun M work, but fate would have in store for him to return to the Archives one final time. For the moment, he busied himself at Xasan Sierra’s shop, where he idly filled cigarette papers with loose tobacco for smokes and adda; the enterprising youth who had forged a career as an aleatory songsmith had grown into a bloodless middle age, drained of all his vital energies. Not even his mother’s whip could salvage his former zeal.

  All this occurred around the same time the great Grenadier Lhereux abandoned his lifelong desire to return to Mother France and decided to remain in the unnameable country to nurse the President back to health so the latter could summon his previous cruel strength and push all the new rats and parvenus of the judiciary and governing council into the ocean. True to his style, the grenadier said nothing to anyone about his plans and instead sought out the most beautiful and willing horses in New Jerusalem to replace Dulcinea, the love mare. But he discovered that rather than improving the President’s condition, Anwar sank deeper into the swamp of melancholia, weeping and singing in a private language into the manes of the beautiful thoroughbreds he would send away after exhausting his equine desires for each animal, and more strangely, that he began to assume certain pathologies of the criminal minds he had grown acquainted with over the years due to his long association with the National Security Service, such as the covering of his face with a mask made of spidersilk gossamer a suspected terrorist reportedly wore, designed to vibrate at the exact frequency of Black Organs telecommunication.