by Ghalib Islam
I hope you will not take my words to mean jealousy, for understand I had no wish to achieve a popularity equal to that of my friend; in the unnameable country, one stays alive by avoiding being spoken of, hunted after. I wished for Niramish to live another thousand years. And yet. And then. Alas, once upon a time, I had a friend named Niramish. And then the first bombing at which I paid scant attention, because everything explodes eventually in this fissile country. Once upon a time, and this is true, the story of my friend Niramish coincides with the story of the first suicide bombing in the unnameable country.
How so: at that time, it had grown fashionable to wear football bags slung over one shoulder, so much that it served at once as a symbol of youthful taste as well as the utilitarian purposes of carrying and storing all manner of items, most of them not at all affiliated with sports. And also: while excluded from most international affairs, the unnameable country had nevertheless participated in its second African Cup football tournament two years earlier, in which, if you care to recall, we placed fourth, and over whose joyous occasion people erupted into the streets, celebrating with confetti and handfuls of rice dropping from overhead and sweetmeats free for all, hear ye and marhabbah. I myself held no interest in sporting events, but Niramish and I shouted and danced the steps with them while disappearing into the three A.M. haze until the coppers called us halt. Somewhere in the distance there was a thud like the falling of a large animal from the sky. Then there sang an MP’s car alarm, but the subsequent cries of horror folded so neatly into those of joy all around us that we did not realize what had happened until late in the morning.
Ten days later, hours before a major financial conference in the capital Victoria, a twenty-year-old commerce student from the nation’s biggest university walked into the Sheraton Hotel. He seated himself in the lobby, as a guest would, casually with arms splayed on a couch, ordered lemonade and today’s International Herald Tribune, the staff came to inquire whether he would have/ they disappeared and then they returned.
Will you be having lunch with us, sir.
Depends on the soup, he replied without glancing up, and unfurled the business section. A single droplet of sweat emerged, unnoticed, on his left temple. He inquired of the soup menu. Then they went away and the light became peaceful in the room.
When the grey clotted plumage of the dining room blast cleared and its effects could be measured, observers were bewildered by its sheer destructive force, which had collapsed several floors above and below the first, and they had trouble believing its cause was a single bomb, though no other evidence but that which was presumed to originate from just one football bag could be found. The Belgian financial ambassador, two World Bank representatives, a high-level oldster from the Chase banking group, five or six interns, American university students on the trip of their lives, and local businessmen numbered among the seventy-six dead. More than three hundred people were injured, some of whom would later die in hospital.
Soon after, Niramish began to birbirbirbirbirbirbirbir to himself while pacing back and forth behind the screen where he soldered and joined wires in Uncleboy’s father’s garage. I asked him to explain the nature of his retreat from everyone in recent days, including me, and he gave me actual electrical sparks from the mouth; but the work of wires was overwhelming him, and, in fact, he wondered from time to time if doctors unhinged his head whether they would not discover his brain replaced with a nest of circuitry.
Disconcerted by the way he was hedging, I pressed him, and asked him for the first time whether he was taking contracts from the Islamic Youth Party or any of the other parties that had been hiring engineering students for their military wings. These matters were not yet well publicized, and in fact I knew of them only after overhearing one or two conversations between Grandfather and Uncleboy, a pair of diehard oldsters who had survived the years now peaking bones expanded motorcycle jumps, had thrived: garage after garage of bikes and nervy boys to motor them, hard sunlight on their hot-pepper-pouch street deals near alleyways, who had raised Niramish and me from scooters to full-power Hondas though we preferred the Warren tunnels, who could augur death in a pin-drop a hundred metres away. My owl’s intuition concurred as I peered into Niramish’s sign and the way his hulk bent forward at the accusation. I saw it in the twitch of his lame arm, in the laboured anger of his response, which I will not allow to grace the page so soon before his death.
Years later, it would grow apparent that I was, in fact, the last of the mastans to know. That actually, Niramish’s bombs were feared and had exploded as far away as Mogadishu, where another state, another civil war, as you will recall. In fact, I found out long after all the national broadcasts began to speak of the Football Bang Electrician, whose signature explosives had garnered him the greatest notoriety of any terrorist figure in the country. He was featured as the subject of talk-show debates about the effectiveness of the new regime’s counterterror measures, was bequeathed bouquets of grudging respect for his perpetual evasion of the authorities, and continued practice of his deadly art. They even echoed rumours of the Electrician’s refusal to accept payment for his services, a detail that should have alerted Hedayat immediately to the truth. But I believed nothing for certain while my friend turned into a minor celebrity of sorts.
However, the wider public would not know what he looked like until he died. Internal staff of the Ministry of Records and Sources swore at each other for not being able to tune in to his head with the shortwave radio, while the Black Organs invited Shin Beit for tips on tracing this destructive character. After our confrontation, Niramish no longer trusted my insights, and for the hours I would sit by his side while he rearranged flux capacitors and hold his voltage meter, I tried my best not to irk him. Understand that while owls are solitude’s signatories and live best alone as undisturbed units, they also possess the capacity to build deep friendships, whose losses tear their confidence in the whole animal kingdom. The Madam’s regime had chosen the Electrician as a symbol, its greatest pariah, and I saw him reflected everywhere in the mirror streets, because who didn’t wear a football bag those days. I myself had several, although Gita urged me to abandon them and even purchased a rather expensive knapsack for me in hopes I would replace them. Even the fact that the cameras craned down from above and focused on their subjects through fisheye lenses, even the fact of armoured insect riot police descending on a crowd of youths without warning, open up, let us see now, of greedy eyes and amorous tongues licking chops for a crumb of so-called evidence: none of these facts could hinder their magnetic draw. In fact, the Electrician’s notoriety only increased their presence everywhere. The only person who didn’t wear one was Niramish, because, as he explained, the strap would ruin his ermine cape.
One knows/one does not know/one cannot believe: all these contradictions flowed seamlessly through me as my friend drifted into an irretrievable loneliness. I awoke one night after having fallen headdown asleep on the coldmetal table of the garage where Niramish worked and could not see him anywhere.
I yelled his name and he returned loudly, I’m here, from two or three feet away, but I couldn’t see him. I blinked-unblinked, called him again, and then his image flickered and readjusted to the reality of that dust-invaded space.
He shook me by my shoulders, held me aloft half as well as my father did once to rid me of the habit of presiding as heresiarch over an imaginary kingdom. Then he became fully visible.
After that incident, Niramish fashioned a pair of glasses for me because he said I was losing my sight, but their purpose was quite the opposite, for Niramish understood my gift-curse of insight and wanted to prevent me from seeing deeper. The glasses seemed altogether ordinary but they disallowed me from understanding any more than the average person when I put them on. It was a kindly gesture to protect his friend from a reality to which he had already adjusted. It was a nervous, selfish act for which I never forgave him.
What do you believe. Did Niramish and others like him
whistle into the abyss to draw out an angry God. Know this: at that time the politics of the country—the banshee competitions of throatskill orchestrated by the gourmandizing Maxwell of the Reagan administration which resulted in the election of our head of state, or the back-and-forth braying by the mullahs, who traded insults after Friday prayers—failed utterly to synchronize with the spirit of the youth. In fact, we laughed at them all and recalled the theatre of the cows on the minarets as staged by the Americans, though some of us, like Hedayat, were not born when that incident occurred.
No, we could not love the Americans because they had imprisoned us with mirror-streets and spied on us with everywhere cameras of a counterfeit movie set; they had burned us with a deceptive phosphorescent fire, which resisted water, and had deprived us of the ability to earn an honest living and driven us to hidden organs of income. But we loved the symbol nevertheless: which politician, secular religious pseudo-socialist, or whateverelse, was not a dumb roan bull at the pulpit’s height. What was politics if not the moocall to assembly at an odd time in the sun’s route across the firmament.
No; understand: whoever committed themselves to combustible politics in those days did so strictly for money, which could not be earned another way, or for some inexplicable personal reason. Ah, if not politics then surely the monetary; yet know Niramish destroyed our hashish networks and did irreparable damage to our connections with dealers of snow, as well as all manner of opiates, when he decided to switch professions. At that time, we were making enough to purchase dozens of ermine capes, and I have already told of his aversion to accepting remunerations for his electrical work. Saint Niramish then, ascetic sadhu dervish Jesuit ideologue and knee-bending prayerer, you do snide, is this.
Yet my responsibility is not to convince you of another emotion but to relate the life of my friend as he lived it. If you must know, a large reason behind his metamorphosis into the Electrician lay in the thrill of craftsmanship. It is difficult to describe the energy that radiated from his body as he disassembled an alarm clock with only four fingers and a thumb, let alone when rewiring a complex circuitboard. But to return to the story, who betrayed Niramish and what was the cause of his death. I could not confirm how they did it until years later, but it was obvious that the failure and capture of the last bomber, incidentally also named Hedayat—widely reported in the press and the cause of tighter closures and the instalment of even more complex mirror-walls in La Maga— and his requisite torture by the Department had something to do with what happened next.
Know that Niramish rarely slept in a single place for more than a week after that, moving from one safehouse to another, harboured by Uncleboy’s associates and taken out to the further reaches of the organization until he disappeared beyond the boughs of the baobab, so to speak, and none of the mastans would report to me even whether he remained alive. One day, I heard a soft hail of pebbles against my window and recognized the imp mastan standing below, Hasan or Hussein, I don’t recall which of the twins. Whichever, he bugled with his empty fingers and I wished I had sprouted wings enough to drop softly down to the ground, but I was forced to sneak out via the conventional route as the household slumbered.
I shuddered though the night was warm, I felt it then and I should have/ we strode through one and the next deserted street and passed through known mirrors and appeared at the other end of the city. There was Niramish, translucent, paler than ever and seated on a bed, separated from Grandfather by the mere distance of a chess set. They were just beginning a game, but Grandfather rose at once with a nod, he departed and left the two of us to talk, but we did not talk for a long time.
In time, the air grew foul and I complained to Niramish, There are no, but where are the windows in this room, friend.
That is because they are suffocating us, yaar.
Niramish was moving pieces around the Queen’s Gambit and replacing the pawns to Staunton Harold/ he was doing this and replacing them. He said, they’re suffocating us, yaar, a phrase he repeated many times, They’re suffocating us, he said while moving pawns to the start. But since he became angry while speaking and returned to fully visible flesh and blood, not at all diaphanous anymore, I was contented. Then he began to sob and became confused about his size. He shrank to my knee’s height and began clutching at my trousers, sobbing.
I said to him, Niramish, this too shall pass, rise up, Niramish, and when he began to fade again and to flicker dangerously, I scooped him up onto my shoulder like a toddler and coddled him. It’s all right, Niramish, there are others in the world and surely this misery is not the world.
He did not believe me then, and in strode Uncleboy, Telephone for Niramish, at which time my glasses fell off my face on their own accord.
Niramish descended from my shoulders because he was shy for his sobbing and his shrinking act and reached down to lift my glasses since he was closer, and as he leaned them up to me he began sobbing again because they had fallen down and broken.
I knew then, I could have said it, I felt everything but others knew absolutely.
This one is important, Uncleboy tugged on my shirt, and we left Niramish.
In the other room they came and went, and the voices jostled me between the apparitions, which spoke. They were hard drinking and a hand extended toward me, and the decanter was there. I smelled it but I had no wish for that. The smell was of whiskey and I worried for Niramish, but the air was not foul in this room and I was glad for that. I could not call the silence by name and it was not silence, for they were talking, and the voices that. A hidden organ heralded its bloody existence inside me and I doubled over in pain. The source of the pain was elusive and I began to run somewhere and to gasp because my throat or my. I waited for the pain but mostly the anxiety to pass and for Niramish’s conversation to be over. When we heard the noise and smelled the smoke I felt the other. Then I ran and I realized in fact I was clutching the decanter.
I splashed the whiskey onto Niramish’s face. Rise, Niramish, I pleaded, but the hole was too large and around his head there was that, and when he was lying like that. I discovered I was sobbing. I thought it was I who with my sobs was making the whole house shake, but probably it was the air outside that was moving like a furious dustbowl that had gathered for a purpose. When all the confusion was over, it was simple to understand: they had inserted a miniature explosive inside the mobile, and when we felt the house shake it was the shudder of a hidden organ, a Black Hawk helicopter that was rising now and from which the bomb had been triggered.
News of the Electrician’s death rippled across the continent, and the whole world knew very soon. It was reported in the newspapers and jumped media into radios and television screens, and there was jubilation like we had never known. They tried to bury him that very day due to public health concerns. His body would not stop issuing blood and we couldn’t understand, though he had been a fat adolescent, why there issued from his body blood equal to that of thirty people or more, and why the bleeding had no end, though they had bandaged his mortal head wound with wound-tight layers of cotton cloth. We would have drowned in the house where Niramish died had they not located a large tumbrel soon after to carry him to the nearest cemetery. On the way there, as respectful silent as a murder of funereal crows, they gathered behind in fours and fives at first before the dozens began streaming and then whole hundreds shorn from their lives in that horsebeaten noonlight, in the flythickened air that clotted in all lungs, drawn by the look of that sad spilling blood, which was overflowing from the tumbrel and spilling brown already for putrefaction, but which continued to drip drip drip drip. Some estimates quoted a number of nearly two hundred thousand, though I was alone that day and cannot verify.
In my grief I tore the budding feathers from my arms and the sunlight burned my skin raw. Know this, however: there were other birds, of the flighted variety unlike your narrator, crows mostly, but magpies and curlews also, as I could tell, which hovered above us like a ragged canopy, or just another conv
oy of Niramish’s close associates and admirers. At the cemetery, they were burying an uncle who had died of lung disease or an infarction of the pulmonary valve, and some of the mastans and nameless rebels, whose faces were shielded from the cameras by scarves, asked them please, will you not give us this spot, for as you can: they pointed to the still bleeding Niramish in the barrow and then to the crowd. But they would not. The whole crowd was ready to give him, to tear up the very earth on which it stood, but still there was no ground that would accept Niramish.
The birds disappeared for lost hope and then not a wisp of cirrus overhead, no shade from even one palmate branch: the crowd swayed like a single unit, vast millipede which this side that sided out of thirst and various other discomforts. For sixteen days it wandered from cemetery to cemetery looking for a place to bury the Electrician, for that was how he had died, not as my friend who took refuge with me from the teasing afterschool crowd, not Niramish and me eating capsicum candies in Confectionarayan Babu’s sweet shop or who had suffered through the bitter alienation due to his indelible odour of curried vegetables as I had for my talons or for my slow metamorphosis into an owl, not as One Arm, Quiet Talker, but the Electrician who had designed explosives that warranted conversations across borders and who now could not stop bleeding even after death.
Some thousand or more people relayed their condolences for my loss. Among them was a man weaved toward me through crowd and criers, stood gregarious with a smile and a sun-gleaming pate. He addressed me by name. In the funeral crowd, I had met Niramish’s relatives, of course, but none so determined to know me and about my gangster-steps with him. Though I avoided the man, no doubt a Black Organ, I was convinced, he persisted, and finally found me pressed against the farthest cemetery wall from the entrance. Hedayat, he called, snapped a pocket mirror to light between thumb and index, showed my face in sunlight before declaring the mirror was magic, a magic gift for my dead nephew’s friend, he snapped fingers. Take it, he handed me the mirror, which reflects the future, he instructed, before facing it in view of a toddler withered suck at his mother’s teat.