by Ghalib Islam
But with Mamun: she watches him curiously, another way, his mouth especially, for that is where his strangeness lies. Not an especially uncharacteristic jaw, not a set of Eastwood or Gable lips, nothing reptilian or psittaciform about the tongue, but watch out when his back is against the wall, and, more often these days, when he concentrates with the intention to dissimulate or argue ten points at once.
No doubt, in turn, Imran follows her gaze and tracks the seconds and microseconds, every error of eyes and breath. As the brother of a three-bullets skull and wasted Owl, of the Owls, possibly the most notorious drug runners and cultivators of opium and cane in the entire continent, he expects perfection, and relates tales of the grand days of Victoria’s goondas as if he himself had taken part, though let us leave his elaborate details out for the moment. The boy hesitates at even the thought of that something unnameable because he has greater worries.
Twelve days from his eighteenth, his mother is perpetually inventing elaborate ways of suiciding, and, unfortunately, none of them works. Electricity has been her latest; she has successfully rewired the whole house in an attempt to find the perfect charge that would deliver an instant passing. The boy wonders whether all the years of wanting to die have in fact backfired: that his mother now thinks of herself, in a demonstrable way, quite impenetrable to death. She has tried, how I have tried, she will shake her head, and still the last does not come, beta, Azarael is allergic to my soul. Perhaps her reason for living, he has thought many times, has become to prove she cannot die. Impenetrable to love, forgetful of details of all but the immediate past, her only pleasure seems to be in her work, in bordering curtains for Zora’s small needlecraft business, of fashioning little socks for infants, in threading the needle eye a hundred times a day.
I did not even die in the Epidemic (which we had no time for mention), she says to her son when he makes an appearance, though the keloid scars around her neck from her noose-attempt flared up during the fever from, and she began to throat-rattle, as we heard in the beginning of this. Such is his mother, edging always toward the unknown, impossible to predict, but. Three times she has taken poison, it should be added, arsenic rat poison included, the efforts of which turned her skin blue, as if she had imbibed universal sins and survived despite. For all that was said of her ceaseless death and dying, her hidden organs continued to pump fluids through her body’s beleaguered channels, and her brain passed and received signals and composed the world anew.
Learn: the mother woman to whom we have been referring is none other than Gita, as you might have guessed, and it is only for the purpose of indulging in mystery that we have withheld her name for the past few pages. Know also: just as glossolalia was her unbeknownst creation, the Server Backslang can be traced to her also. Nowadays, the youths claim Server was born on the motorbike. Mamun Ben Jaloun would later say he was its progenitor, its first cadence-rhymester, and hold a grudge against the world for never being recognized as such.
But what is the Server Backslang. And tell us, Hedayat, how it came to be. Is it located in a robust elephant-thread for Gita’s failing eyes, for the several hundred coasters to make before her son’s birthday, in the nonsense melody: a backwards Caliban on a tempest island who makes merry, speaks Abol Tabol. Gita’s mind isn’t what it used to be. In any case, a new vernacular soon appears in the garage, which is no laughing matter. The practical street applications of such a language are self-evident to a young enterprising youth like Mamun, and the Screens begin to forge collegial code-words with colleagues and customers. It comes into play during their robbery of a shipment of cane, where a few backwords cue the hijack, and Pestilent B, a swift, small rodent-like man, drives a motorcycle alongside the vehicle as his brother, a sidecar aptly called Pestilent A, climbs aboard.
Excuse me, sirs, but do you know the way to: and then the bullet, as confusion scatters the ranks of driver and shipper, and there is blood too.
For the Screens it is their first large-scale heist of a larger drug enterprise, and the only question becomes where to store and how to sell doublequick. For the first time there is no more room in the butchery and they must contemplate holding companies and crooked banks, of which there is no shortage in the unnameable country.
Like a king of the chessboard, Imran’s actual role in the gang’s everyday transactions is limited to single-steps, though theoretically he has freedom to move in any direction he likes. To make longer movements, he needs to utilize knights and bishops. Or, if you would care to envision the Screens as a basilica: Qismis is the chancel near the front, Imran watches from the rear as its narthex, Mamun is now the nave, flanked by the scooters and other Hondas in the aisles; but we needn’t be so formalist about it, god does not live here. Things are changing, in any case, dynamism is the key to their success, and a church is too static a metaphor.
On Mamun’s eighteenth, Imran imbibes more spirits than the stock exchange gambler, otherwise remembered as merely the red-nosed Theodore Quincy, father of John Quincy the pirate-emperor. Imran stumbles out of the Pepperpot and disappears with only his assistant, one of the Pestilent brothers, after him with his bad accident leg. The rest of them tarry, voices lowered, with quiet intermittent laughter, though their hereandthere caresses make it plain that Qismis and Mamun would like to be left alone. Respectfully, though a little curious about how the night will change the dynamics of the Screens, they follow out of doors. Dissolve the scene of bar stools, guitar music, and spilled booze mixing with the occasional fist.
Come, she takes him by the hand and they pass a high-walled corridor and the sound of a key turning a lock. A small animal rushes at Qismis’s knee and shivers there awaiting a caress or a cudgelling. Scoundrel, she pets, and Mamun notices it is a little girl, after all, aged two or three perhaps, but who moves with astonishing speed, one minute on top of what is probably a table, but the darkness, and in the next moment on the countertop, rushing around and spilling marbles or rocks from her mouth, one by one by one.
Your sister.
Yes, Qismis says, and orders her to bed. The girl opens her mouth and at first Mamun hears nothing, but then he catches a note on the highest register, and he realizes the girl’s protest is one meant for the bats. There she remains, standing on the countertop, rubbing her eyes and crying in a language few can hear, and for a moment Mamun wonders where the irresponsible parents might be to allow a small child to remain awake at such an hour. Something stirs around his foot, and he realizes he is stepping on a blanket, and a shape objects to being awakened with a murmel, and then another murmel murmel, and suddenly the room is overflowing with a cauliflower garden of infants and slightly older.
You are the eldest, Mamun again, as Qismis stifles her laughter. The front room is the nursery, she explains, and begins shushing and suckling from the bottle and trying obviously to prevent the parents from waking.
How many.
She lights a lamp and the sight overwhelms: blankets and cushions, toys, crumpled newspaper beds and plastic bottles half-full of milk. Seventeen, but they are not all siblings.
Hedayat will explain: Some are cousins, the children of disappeared neighbours, many reasons all packed into this room. Since Mamun feels ashamed to have his hands empty while she is beleaguered by the score, he tries bidding one or two of them to sleep, inventing nursery rhymes under his breath, bunlets and carrots, songs for the marmots, how many ducks do you have, and so forth. At four-thirty, after a head count, they finally manage to have them fed and succoured, cooing before retiring to her room, but the task for which they came here seems no longer appropriate. She changes the sheets and informs a little tersely this is an old-fashioned swansdown mattress, has he ever slept on such a thing, one must be careful. They lie down none too gently and all the white feathers waft out from under their bodies and turn up into cirrus clouds before spreading all across the room. (It would be this that would break them, a single feather of evidence would be enough.)
Their bodies are too tired then a
nd sleep finds them before, but the morning is different, and the rest of the day is pleasure after pleasure after their ravenous hunger. Somewhere in its midst, though she knows otherwise because they all go to the brothels, she smiles when he says, I’ve never known the touch of a woman before you.
Now it just so happens that not all the Screens would prefer a changing of the guards, including Mamun, not that our hero has it in his mind to lead the group; if offered the chance he would reel back, since he is actually incapable of the task due to a lack of desire and strength of conviction; to add to his bad credentials, he has fallen in love. A furtive discussion occurs anyway and divides the crowd.
They all know Nikhil, who was initially unsure of Mamun Ben Jaloun’s leap-frogging over scooter onto a privileged status, has great respect for glossolalia and Backslang, among attributes that have resulted in the Screens’ recent cull. Others are not so sure. The effect of glossolalia is no magic, a trickster’s sleight of tongue whose effect cannot be fully measured since it has been used only several times, and then only to sow confusion among the ranks of enemies, such as the Dushman, as we have witnessed, and which could easily have been produced by weapons or by other means. Backslang, meanwhile, is a code language, which has come in handy on one major occasion, and like all codes, if understood by enemies, it could become a detriment greater than its boon.
Nikhil, however, points out possible glossolalist uses in negotiating contracts and formulating trade relations, while besides, and here the ad hominem lowdown begins: Imran is a drunk, a cheater, lout, how many of us have been promised full cuts of the flank and been tossed neck bones instead. Beneath our feet hangs a whole open-sesame cellar, whose secret password only he knows, overflowing with so many riches that, and how much of all this is yours, he points, or yours, he points. I am more Screen than he, Nikhil does not say.
In the darkness of the garage, emptied of its three top members, he has taken temporary control and the sound of his own voice is inebriating. There are, of course, protests.
If insurrection is what he proposes, one of the Pestilent brothers hisses, then the devil himself should take the poison instead of passing the chalice.
He plays with a yo-yo, not looking directly with even the one cross eye that sees, the other staring glassily into the future, which, as everyone knows, it has some weak power to augur; he cat’s-cradles, walks the dog, snakes the plastic yellow around the world. He does not ask where is, nor do any of the others notice the sound of a rodent-man scurrying; no one wonders where goes his brother, Pestilent B, who played, if you will recall from all the stories since the incident, a major role in the heroin heist that forever changed the fortunes of the Screens.
And so, through the dark mewling alleyways travels Pestilent B, kicking cats and scratching flea bites and swearing at his misfortune of having to play spy while the master drinks away yet another evening, composing spitting foaming the right words at the mouth as he heads across town to find Imran.
The conversation finds Qismis and Mamun the following day, and neither is enthused by the idea, but the die has been cast. After a full week’s absence, the leader walks shipwrecked and dripping back to the garage, claiming to have undertaken the longest sea-journey across the highways of the state in order to secure a major investment. What investment, let me tell you.
Here, you: Qismis is awed by his state. Give me your, she removes his shredded denim jacket. She has never seen him so wolf-bitten, so excitable.
Imran lets, but doesn’t stop for a breath or a word edgewise against him: I went to meet a member of the Taints, good first-class goondas who normally do middle jobs/ tain’t cocks, tain’t assholes, he joked, just carryalls that mule drugs across border passings or on airplanes/ who need help with an odd job, he explained, during perhaps the largest political function of the century, involving some of the most famous international dignitaries.
Of course I agreed, and on my way back, he relates by way of an explanation for his withered appearance: There was a crowd of marchers, protesting this and that, as they are apt to do in our age, not just here in the unnameable country but all around the world. All I did was merely: will you not give me passage on this hellish hot hot day, and they took me to be an enemy of their political cause, will you believe. I am not a politico, to hell with your cause, I said, which made them only madder, and they began with their banners and placards and fists and some with even britvas, and so here I am, one backstab away from death herself. But I have come to deliver the good news, he was on a roll, they could not protest, the plan was too complete, he had gone to great lengths, they would not only let him down if they spoke out but also the opportunity to increase the group’s status.
Imran flew over the details, spun on his heels as he spoke, leapt and pirouetted, on the night of suchandsuch, he announced the greatest opportunity bankers, politicians, a whole vault of who knows what, not to mention pastries, gooseberry wine: to get inside is the hardest trick, and some of us must up up up through the sewage pipes carrying our good suits in polythene sacks, others must sneak in days in advance and secrete ourselves in various locations throughout the building, while still others should be hidden in beer vats, such as you, you, and you: he pointed to Nikhil, Qismis, and Mamun. The first obeyed, the latter two did not.
For all his recent rebel talk, Nikhil is more the archangel Gibreel, closer to God than the damned Iblis, a follower of directions more than a rebel. He hears the nozzle hooked onto the aperture and then there is a muffled scream, could have been the beer through the pipes. In the autopsy weeks later, all his organs are discovered drowned, alcohol poisoned, though many had leaked out through skin and poking bones into the pressurized liquids. After that horrid affair, published in all the major papers as a macabre oddity, there were no more rebellions in the Screens.
Dignitaries from around the world—well, a handful of KUBARK information officers from PD Prime, or in everyday language, Uncle Sam’s nephews disguised as Eastern European dignitaries—were at the important conference at which the Screens were helping the Taints. The question of the evening: should the unnameable country join the Eastern bloc. It was famous and fateful and would bring the United States into the equation and trigger a twenty-year-long proxy war that threatened to destabilize the whole region, the whole of which begins with a most eccentric speech, reported the world over, in some cases as an exacting example of Communist madness, characterized by others as exciting and inventive. In the beginning, however, it is quite clear Nikita Khrushchev has caught stage fright after realizing on the podium he has misplaced his speech. His chief adviser pleaded sick and refused to accompany him to such a godforsaken corner of the world, and now the great leader of the Soviet republic finds himself without words and suddenly without official manners or the ability to improvise. (Recall that from time to time it will occur to even the most experienced actors, and politicians are no different.)
From under the podium, Mamun cannot know any of these things, he is merely hiding, and the first kick he receives is not meant as anything but an expression of Khrushchev’s frustrations. But the leader realizes lengthening his foot releases a parcel of words out of nothingness, let us not ask by what means divine or otherwise, in a quiet whisper: Ladies and gentlemen of these United Nations.
He looks around the room. No one else seems to have heard them. What dwarf or miracle homunculus was hidden here, but Khrushchev dares not search the podium. A miracle is a miracle unrevealed, and loses all power to bring the people to their reverential knees when the tearing Christ is demonstrated to be a fraud. Nikita Khrushchev invents this justification and continues. The words seem like a right fit for the occasion, so the great leader, sweating underarm boulders and not from the equatorial heat, repeats them as if they were his. Kick kick, another little kick. The last one a little too close to the head. And the words: We have gathered here to discuss the possibility of the unnameable country’s role in the greater family of socialist nations of the world.<
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Surprised, and a little indignant, like a mule realizing for the first time he must be put to work, Mamun Ben Jaloun cannot remove himself from the role of spindoctor and correspondingly supplies words to kicks. Another kick.
The question, of course, is not so simple since the Soviet family must take into account the distinct history and cultures of the people in this region, as must the unnameable country consider our differences.
A pause and a wince. A kick further, though softer, more encouraging.
And: if it is possible for Cuba, Tanzania, it is possible et cetera, and we must declare it would be a great caltilp pahsim, Mamun Ben Jaloun recites, to lose the unnameable country to the capitalist mode of production. It would be a pahsim, Khrushchev repeats, having lost the ability to invent or speak agentially, as bound to the underpodium speech supplier as today’s teleprompter politicians are to theirs, a great caltilp pahsim, he says, to which the audience laughs heartily at the neologism, comprehending it to mean an animal of failure, as newspapers for years afterward would refer to the next government boondoggle as a great possum or walloping marsupial of a mistake out of whose pouch many appended problems would emerge. The last part of the address is rollicking backtongue, which few besides the Screens in the room understood, but within the style of the whole document, it seemed quite fitting. Governor Anwar rises to applaud and the whole room follows. There are hoots and whistles from Imran, which gives him away as an outsider.
The KUBARK agents are the first to dive into the stuffed pastries before taking flight to Washington. Two days later, the newly elected Richard Nixon, having campaigned on the escalation of the Vietnam War to certain victory, sends three lonely Phantoms over Victoria: a school, a mosque, and a hospital are destroyed. The Governor, who, it’s true, was edging closer to an official alliance with the U.S.S.R. and was indeed swayed by Khrushchev’s speech, but had not yet dove, immediately raised the receiver for the Kremlin. Four hundred and thirty-one people perished, over a thousand were seriously injured, including Zora’s niece, her husband, and a baby daughter, while Imran’s brother died, as did sixty-four teachers, a roomful of worshippers gathered for Friday prayer, fifty-seven dialysis patients, and so on; but none of our chief characters was lost in that first raid, so the story may continue more or less unabated.