by Ghalib Islam
Then one day, after the foreign doctors came and went, neither curing nor burying, a gentle shower of fireflies descended as if it was time, like the clatter of rice on rooftops of concrete or corrugated tin. The roosters awoke first, then the hens and the mongrel curs, the camels and horses and donkeys, the rust faded from the exhaust pipes of cars and metal poles, and the walls stood up straighter. Finally, when the people began to reawaken at seven-thirty in the evening, they could not understand why the whole earth glowed green or how centuries had passed and the same ruination stood everywhere: gutted buildings, cracked mirror streets, everywhere the same stench of squalor and putrefaction. Some had dreamed all this to expiration and wanted to return to the paradisiacal blue mist through which they had hitherto been walking and which held no memories, only a soft music without source and which was listened to by all the organs; others had been capable of dreaming only what was their daily retinue, and awoke believing that if they were unable to imagine a better existence, no change was possible in so-called real life.
Sadly, we swept away the firefly corpses from the streets, but their phosphorescent odour stuck to everything: clothing, cars, our conversations, the sheets, to every grain of rice we ate; we pulled it out in glowing clumps of our hair. For a year afterward we breathed only that incurable sadness that no prayer could heal, and it was rumoured that no one made love anymore. All the plants in the region where the illness had originated were deracinated, the wells destroyed so no flies could breed, and whole villages and towns left to the same fate as the Abd not so long ago.
At that time, for the first time, Hedayat wanted to speak, since while he dreamed he had gathered ideas that necessitated a more complex language than merely pointing. That was also when he and Niramish began visiting Narayan Khandakar’s chocolate shop after school, and for free, because he was my father’s adda friend, we were able to wander that neighbourhood foundation of childhood dreams unattended, and to consume at will.
Owner babu offered, take, Hedayat, anything you like, and Hedayat chose the most grown-up kind of candy he could see: rum candy. The candy tickled at first, iced his tongue, then shot metal nasal, clouds of invisible smoke, moved throat to lungs and came out in coughs. The first sounds Hedayat made were guttural, from a region deeper than his stomach, which were not the intestines had no name, from hidden organs.
What did you chew, son, Confectionarayan was confounded by the effects of an eating thing in his shop.
Hedayat’s first words were babble in tongue in fluid indiscernible language that Confectionarayan knew was not the result of goo candy, which you chewed before placing in your parents’ paths, which stuck their shoes to the asphalt, or the Amoon brand of gum, whose packages advertised in playful colours to shoot you out of the atmosphere, fly you to the moon if you blew a bubble larger than your head, or the capsicum candies called recallrecall®, a doublenegative brand of sweets so strong they made you forget you, and which sold best and was the latest bubblegum craze. Confectionarayan made me take water, ran to get milk when the symptoms continued.
Hedayat first did ow ow ow ow ow because his tongue had fallen asleep and he couldn’t spit out the rum candy. Niramish and Confectionarayan were so worried they ignored any potential deeper meanings of the event and interpreted the miracle only as a body in danger: the owner of the shop finally managed to reach into my throat and removed the obstacle, and Hedayat choked and spat out his first words, a whole comprehensible sentence, without angelic aid: Thank you.
As with my leap from the horizontal to the walking vertical, I shot from mum to full speech and fire so fast, dizzy among multiplied faces of Niramish and Narayan Babu in the shadows of candy boxes, shelves of bubblegum sugar buttons sour keys Turkish delights butter tarts lemon squares myriad sweet celebrations, I nearly missed my uncle’s warning, words so many first words, babu, but watch out: most grown-ups aren’t like me; if you talk too much they’ll wash your mouth out with blood.
But it’s difficult for him to follow such rules. Keep in mind: Hedayat is almost a glossolalist.
At first, I chirp incessantly, identify my surrounding environment methodically, overhead is a warbling swift, Chaetura pelagica, a common enough avian, liable to fly into a chimney now and again, turn a Roman arch three-hundred-sixty and you have over there, I point, a mosque oniondome, or churchtops of certain denominations, defining, explaining, raising such a clatter that Niramish, who at first is joyous to have acquired a speaking Hedayat for a friend, becomes exasperated. So I try and include him in conversation. What do the cameras film, I ask him as we walk nightingale streets where caged birds for sale shriek into microphones placed to hang from balconies overhead, as we unknowingly trace the gangster-steps of our forebears in tin pan alleys where cameras watch blind howling beggars considered some of the best unrecognized singers in the business, who separate gold from toilet water in plates and dishes and bowls along veins of open-air sewage canals. Movies, he points to posters of abundant Hollywood films. I look at the ominous omnipresence of cameras on top of traffic lights, street signs, newspaper boxes, at cameras peering car windows, through trucks, huge honking cameras ported by beastly types, more cameras than there were yesterday, and I don’t believe him. I think there’s more to the story, I say, and as I begin to/ Would you shut up shut up already, please, you’re making it worse, this headache is made worse by your endless. I am leaving, going gone bye-bye gone home now, screams the exasperated Niramish before leaving me in a labyrinth. Neither he nor his friend suspected that the tsetse fly disease, which had officially been eradicated, was responsible for Hedayat’s unending talk methodizing the world.
The sound of my voice astounds me so much that I drive the family to earplugging at night, unable to quit even while sleeping, when, perhaps due to some lingering effects of the tsetse fly disease, I dream night after night of encyclopedic landscapes that feature your humble narrator roaming as boy prince, naked as Adam. Hedayat waves his hand with regal flair as he presides, heresiarch, over an animal kingdom of the mind inhabited by imaginary flora and fauna finned feathered petals. Mixed-up animals leap treebranches appearing as tusks. He turns his head one moment to the serpents shed lightning skin in the thick copse within which floats a stream. One million effervescent frogs swim through the ventricles of a beating heart floating disembodied, below the clear water.
I begin assigning names: You are a pumasticate, I call the feline mouth roar jungles into savannas during dream hours while searching bloody bite, the mouth known to devour children in their sleep, the pumasticate who travels with his friend behemadillo, a giant armoured reptile that shakes mountains with steps, who ferries the pumasticate on his hard outer shell as he sucks the air for insects like the murmuring elephantickles my right ear at night hot words Iagian whisper. Irrelephants, you shoo, I usually slap my ear and say: onward ho, go now, I tell them, toward life or some measure of it. Animalia, mammalia, chordata, dividing and subdividing hallucination until one day, the kingdom turns unexpectedly into tsetse fly nightmare, into a vast antiseptic room where employees peer shortwave radios through headphones. I tiptoe through that strange scene of cubicles wide-eyes soft decibels, learning the crafts of assembly and collection, muttering excitedly when I realize, horrified, how first the thoughts are heard on wireless radio before they’re stored on magnetic tape. I pace jittery across the linoleum floor, talking louder, explaining to myself how then the tapes are cut and assembled according to the specifications of the Department 6119 inspector handling the terror case until the scene disintegrates and I discover my father, astounded by my words, raising me horrified up into the air, dangling legs oaken arms holding me up. I see him through stillglued eyes, babbling sleep. See him lifting me into mid-air: child of clay and of clotted blood, he names me, born of woman, he indicts me of childhood silliness excess, faults the strength and burst of my language my play. He roars and thunders against my dangerous words. When he sets me down on the floor he hugs me so deep all the air leave
s my lungs. Enough, he says, but the tsetse fly illness does something to me: from then on, I begin muttering goongooning nasal mmm and llliquids, my blood leaping mouth onto floor. I would froth from the mouth, I shit you not; these early glossolalia scenarios were truly frightening to me and for others around me. Desperate for a cure, my mother dragged me doctor to doctor, convinced the cause was microbial and could be quelled with the right antibiotic, but they disagreed with her after a handful of failed medicinal attempts, arguing they had difficulty diagnosing the illness, they had decided glossolalia couldn’t exactly be termed an infection and therefore couldn’t stop it so simply.
Glossolalia. What is glossolalia and what do they say of glossolalia. You may know it as panting keening raise-the-roof kind of God talk, but my automatic tongue was different. I didn’t pray for glossolalia and I fasted because I was hungry, as disobedient children do when they can’t find what they want to eat. And though I’d like to eschew all presence of the characteristic diagnostic signals church fever flushed face and tears observable in the few Pentecostal establishments in our unnameable country, I must recall that my father found me one day flapping arms in T-shirt, arms with budding vanes barbs barbules, stirring the fetid air in my room with hairy forearms that looked like feathered wings, muttering the story of once upon a time a father imprisoned his son in a wardrobe.
Who are you talking to, I heard a voice behind me and turned my neck one hundred eighty degrees wide-eyed right around like an owl to find Mamun Ben Jaloun’s astonished face staring at me. From then on, I tried to be quieter about my heedless iterations, but they emerged without warning like Niramish’s narcoleptic sleep sessions. I would fly fantastical lines without consideration or worry for my surrounding listeners. I had become a glossolalist, an inexplicable condemnation, lifetime commitment.
The only individual who had not dreamed a thing and who passed the entire plague year as if it were a single night’s dead stone rest was Mamun M. With a yawn, he returned to his idle life in Xasan Sierra’s shop, which congregated with the motley neighbourhood jobless crowd, who recounted how they had passed that long time, and some wondered whether such a plague was so bad after all if it had allowed them to see so many splendorous things and if the bad things all vanished like mist at the end. Not unlike life, Mamun M shrugged, drawing heavily on an unfiltered.
He smoked almost as much as Xasan these days and had acquired a deep phlegmatic cough typical of men who gambol from one to another topic of the political, who make nada, talk on talk all day, just doing adda, he would employ the Indian term if asked, before resuming talking late into night after pulling down the steel grating over the shopfront and wandering over to one of the illegal garage bars all known and being shut down onebyone daily.
One day, while sleeping into the mid-afternoon, Hedayat, blind owl from birth because he was born from having swum clairaudient in mother waters for years while listening to her stories, learning to understand the world without seeing, who was blind enough to get his hands fruitexploded become talons from dangling cluster bombs on boughs near the schoolyard, bursts into his chamber hooting squawking chitti chitti chitti chitti chitti chitti, flapping arms and holding a black envelope that would forever break Mamun M’s life of leisure.
You are hereby ordered to report at once to the Archives Department of the Ministry of Records and Sources, sincerely, Supervisor, reads the letter.
For years, Mamun Ben Jaloun has been on extended leave from the Department on grounds of medical invalidity after going mad following the discovery of his father’s recorded thoughts, horrified by the implications of wandering dark hallways and corridors of the Archives, of shelving and reshelving metal receptacles of human minds, and he considers claiming sickness as continuing reason for which to forgo the injunction. After the whipping incident, neither Shukriah nor Gita complains about his idle existence, and it would be perfect for saving his life if he is capable of sensing what lies ahead; but as he watches Shukriah waddle up the stairs from the clothing store to the apartment, back down again, weighted more each day with their second child, and he feels nostalgia for his desires in those early years when, while apart, each would cross halfacity’s distance to know the other’s thoughts. He recalls trying, one day recently, to imagine her mind, shocked to find a haze like telephone static and a labyrinth of endless identical empty rooms guarding the vast arena that separated them, and his steps growing heavier, his breathing more laborious with the sadness of that discovery.
Mamun M realizes his time at Xasan Sierra’s cigarette shop and the concomitant daily routine he has repeated for several years now is nothing but a way to avoid expiating for nearly fifteen years of joblessness. He tries helping Shukriah and Gita in the shop, as he had attempted years ago right after he left the ministry, and they don’t protest his presence, in fact welcome it with warm smiles, but when he realizes he’s only tripping over feet, his own and theirs, and when a second, more strongly worded letter arrives from the Ministry of Records and Sources, he begins to worry about knocks on the door in the middle of the night.
Nevertheless, I will always claim that when my father returned to the Archives, it was more as self-administered punishment than any other reason. Recall from all reports on the government at that time, Xamid Sultan’s hold on the government was tenuous, and while the fate of many interim leaders of our continent is to graduate to an interminable persistent rule, his weaknesses of being a nationalist at heart yet too weak with the cudgel to tribal demands were exposed soon after he assumed the helm. One day he swore it was Friday because he saw it reflected in the mirror eyes of so many of his comrades when he went to address the Parliament about the latest American offer of building permanent navy bases on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Eden, and an air force landing strip in the hinterland plains that he almost. How to say it: recall video replays of the moment of pure fear experienced by the Governor during his mock execution, though he himself had designed the event from start to end. For several months after, Xamid Sultan shuffled from office to office, conducting his affairs like a man with an incubating fever inside and unsure of seeking out a physician’s counsel; the slightest whispers pulled him closer into his shadow, and when the appropriate Friday actually came around, he was almost relieved to see the angel of death turn the corner in front of him and address him by his familiar name, which was known only to his mother and brother, and some would later declare he even smiled when the Mauser was raised to his already bleeding skull.
In the next three months, our unnameable currency, which had been nailed to the British pound for as long as anyone could remember, tumbled to near devaluation, and the presidency exchanged hands five times: Samir Gallili, a Chicago Boy inculcated into the black arts of global finance by the tutelage of Milton Friedman/ no stopping the tenebrous palsy of his hands/ at dinner circus legislature mornings/ lend voice to a crumpled shaky paper/ shot by unknown assailants in his sleep/ Samater Adel-Yaqub, a personal friend of Julius Neyere whom he met while attending the University of Edinburgh, but not the same brand of socialist, more the variety Big Baba liked, as he himself would say/ hoven off his hinges by whispers madness machinations/ given: the tapes were discovered later and the small player also/ possible impossible/ slow measured speech of the Manchurian candidate/ thought of as restitution for the death of the previous by opponent party members; two elections in three weeks/ voter turnout sixty-seven and seventythree percent respectively/ names of the candidates wind-skewed into oblivion, no one will recall/ vanished from even the records of the Archives.
Finally, there rose that steely woman who would inspire the whole country with her cruelty and the imaginative ways with which she would interpret the laws prescribed to her from above. Why was the Madam aside from her flatiron hair fixated by gel and hairspray. What were the days of the Madam, which were also endless but conscribed within a more limited infinity than Anwar’s. Who was she to be able to usher an angry God to the unnameable country. Rec
all that in the Governor’s days, Allah had been present in politics, no ceremony began without a bismillah and none ended without a munazaat, but everyone thought of this as nothing more than the continuation of life, and while people such as Shukriah and Mamun were the exception, they were not ostracized or defeated into submission for living outside matrimonial bounds. Recall, since you may have heard, no woman in my family wore the hijab before 1990, let alone the niqab. No one was stoned barbaric drowned for witchcraft crazy. Remember that the cruelties that followed were different.
It was Maxwell who had wanted it: this much is clear. No one knew when he had arrived and some even claimed that he had disguised himself as a member of Parliament for years, but they surely noticed him one day during a desperate meal when what remained of the original Privy Council was trying to plan what to do now after ek dum fut-a-fut, hosanna, everything down the Thomas Crapper. Then the screeching sound came and they could not help but plug ears with fingers against that offence of metal scraping Pyrex plates: an ox-large man was dividing an omelette into so many delicate little pieces and they watched him and watched him while awaiting his first bite. Eventually, someone gathered the nerve to ask him, astonished, what the hell, to leave, and with the world’s longest sigh, which scattered their papers and rattled the windowpanes, without a word he extracted a figurine of Ronald Reagan from his person and drew the string on its back.
The presidential doll began to speak. It informed that before them sat a man who had been granted moral authority by the American government to supervise all affairs within reason in the unnameable country at this time of great crisis, my friends, please bestow upon him all the love you would upon me.
They couldn’t get rid of him after that. Recall, as you may have heard, Maxwell was the one who transferred briefcases stuffed with American currency to the smaller religious parties to bolster disharmony and disunity, and years later, would be accused by historians of concatenating the region into an archipelago. It was he who went around the Parliament with calipers and a ruler, measuring various anatomical parts, looking aah into mouths, insisting that members stand on one foot for as long as their balance held, trying to determine the most eligible leader by means hitherto unknown to us. At last, after insisting on a screaming test of who can voice-shatter tossed Pyrex plates the loudest and the most, he set aside three junior members, out of whom he chose a woman, Wafaa Ifreet, otherwise known as the Madam, to claim the seat of power though Anwar would always rule from afar.