by Ghalib Islam
After a certain length of time—and note that it was not at all uncommon for vagabonds of that era to end up there—Mamun Ben Jaloun realized he had found himself in the district of La Maga where the movie studios were in full swing, and he realized he didn’t know when they had started, when a camera here a microphone there or a region of scaffolds had multiplied into certainty, what compass his feet had followed to this place of shadows without origin. He couldn’t tell when the world had begun.
My father hummed softy, and when a syllable burst somewhere behind him, a sound without warning that surprised him/ frightened, he hummed louder, lost his step, stumbled, then started defiantly singing all the notes he knew in order to overcome his fear of these unknown streets, of walking dark streets in his freed prisoner outfit, its longstanding wear and tear, and he thought of what he could be in this movie studio city, actor singer or what, and what name he would call himself. He addressed the second problem first, and decided since movie personnel never used their real names, he would invent an alternative. Shikari, he thought of choosing, or maybe Mamun Shikkok/ too didactic, old fashioned, they would surely say/ Mamun Mamun, then, he thought of keeping it simple/ you’re almosting it, he thought/ Mamun M, he decided finally, Mamun M, he said aloud, louder, he said it again, leaped up and clicked his heels, sure of
So my father wanted to be a singer. Did he do it. What did he do. And then. And yet. Hedayat thinks. He remembers. Recall, though I hadn’t told you that when he was younger, Hedayat would lie on the family room couch after school and read old magazines featuring his father.
With his glossolalist tongue, yours truly would prater away in a low voice to find all the missing notes in-between entertainment journalism. He would hum, sometimes he would sing juicy lyrics claiming the strangest of things. On one occasion he landed the jackpot, discovered that all of Mamun M’s studio performances needed raisins for some reason.
Raisins, why the hell for. Raisins, raisins alone and at every meal: raisins imbedded in rice or as the passive ingredients of a chicken dish or khir or dahi, Mamun would find raisins intolerable: wrinkled palms and fingertips, their ancient, manymonthsearlier touch, the face of Qismis, the smell of her clothing, her hair, would rise up ghostly from the plate, a sense of longing, raisins, absolutely necessary. The literary force of raisins would seize Mamun’s throat, and he would discover early in his career as a playback singer his incapacity to perform without a fistful of raisins first, like a saltpetre gargle for the throat or a kerosene wick to some saccharine gunblast first line of a song. A hit. Which is not to say that for Mamun Ben Jaloun/ Mamun M, I mean/ song stood equated with nostalgia, and the brief memory of his romance with Qismis needed to be rekindled each time he opened his throat to sing. Eventually, the face of Qismis disappeared so that he could no longer recall its contours or its cleft chin, its sharpness which collected prominently at the nose: as if they had been dried out and put to mortar and pestle, she turned into powdered sound, and the flight of one thousand verses he would pen on such diverse topics as the names of the cities of the unnameable country, the open veins of La Maga La Maga, a thief’s despair at being forced to rob his beloved’s home, the contemplations of a blind vicar, the elegy for a man who turned into a thousand billboards, who performed in English, Quinceyenglish, Somali, and some later translated by Manna Dei into Bengali and Hindi, within the short span of eight or nine years, had nothing at all to do with her.
Then total khatam before thirty: his voice and fame would be reduced to cinders, and after a few failed attempts at rising up the rungs of La Maga Studios as a songwriter, he would be flattened into the impecunious inarticulate role of boom-mike operator: hold it higher, MM, still in the shot, bhai, what a duffer this one. His heart was never in it, and until he would meet my mother.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, too far ahead. Let’s back to the right instant. There is work to be done. How did it all begin. Don’t you want to know how my father got his big break. He was not discovered in a chic café in the artists’ quarters of La Maga and celebrated for his jawline or the shape of his eyes, dragged into the frame of a shot, stand next to her, beta, let us see how the light falls on your ruddy hair. He never possessed the face of an actor. Neither did he stand in line with all the wretched art school graduates of the unnameable country at the gates of a new production, thronging like an infestation of carpet beetles, waiting to be handed out some minor role in order to be able to place their feet onto the rickety staircase of La Maga Studios while brazen balusters came undone by their collective weight. Know this: they heard him only. In fact, it was only his voice they ever saw. Once imprisoned, always in prison: this guard would not let him pass. He waited all day, however, and as a motorcade carrying the Director made its way inside, took a second chance.
He introduced himself unintentionally with a hiccup, and the hiccups continued. Sir-hic, I am hic-hic to have been hic-cluded in the cavalry, but I was late hicka for my shoe, you see this, he takes off a shoe and removes a bent hobnail holding together some fragments of unstitched leather, and therefore. But this guard was not a sleepy sack of potatoes; he was as large as Pantagruel and a suspicious fellow besides, with halitosis one could sniff-source a hundred metres away.
You are either included, he boomed with his badsmelling tongue, as part of the Director’s inner staff or you go to hell.
And yet. Aha: underneath the ogee of his pants flies my father, laughing gleeful, already intoxicated though he has not yet had a spot to drink. The guard does not know whether to follow or stand awaiting the next part of the motorcade. Finally, he waves off the error: where will he go, he thinks, there are many others like me inside, only stronger and larger, he cannot get very far.
The guards inside were indeed larger, each one taller than the previous, but that was their precise weakness, and my father manages to swoop under all their legs and to pass onward. He cranes his neck as he arrives upon an oriel window, oooh aaah, how beauteous, he gawks, not real of course, painted on, papier-mâchéd and cardboarded together last Thursday, but it looks fitting for a grand whereforeartthou Romeo scene. Meanwhile, the hullabaloo is spreading, some guards are even venturing to leave their posts and running running my father disappears into one of the actors’ living-sleeping quarters, dodging a hanging lamp and burying underneath garments that wrap around themselves and the entire room in miles of silk and velvet. Know that he is inside an actress’s dressing room and hiding with his fist around a bottle of rum brandy, or what he thinks is, pinched from her furtive collection, drinking gleeful, burping, hiccupping laughing alone about nothing at all and without fear. The fire burns away everything hard palate uvula and tongue to mush, soft palate lips all of it, and only by probing with two fingers is he able to reassure his speaking organs remain intact. By the third sip, the fire opiates, and by the fourth, he is fast asleep, though still hiccupping twice a minute or so.
Fee fi, the actress Sharmilla returns with a tattooed giant, presumably her lover or perhaps a handler, why not both. Whipping her purse into the sea of ochre and azure costumes, she begins to plant kisses on Handler Lover.
Normally acquiescent to her affections, this time he wrinkles his brow, pushes her back lightly, fee fi, and begins to sniff the cloth and pulling at it, uncovering chairs, a bed, among other items of furniture.
Don’t hiccup, Mamun Ben Jaloun, or do so: perform only according to the story’s needs. Hic-hic.
Wait, I smell something as well, she surveys the air and treads across the folds. What she smells is an opened bottle of austerlitz, her father’s gift before graduating into the endless studio, now do not open this, bibi, before twenty-six minimum, and she has managed thus far, and would have kept the promise had not.
Got him, the giant shouts: little rabbit by the scruff of his neck, punching kicking air, awakened rudely and hic-hiccupping, and now to be sent flying out of the film studio boundaries. Loafer from somewhere, the giant gnashes his teeth and lifts Mamun up to eye
level.
And without a thought—since all manifestations of glossolalia, as we have noticed, are aleatory if anything, subconscious and prior to thinking—my father launches into a song about floating on the vaulted wind, the seductive weather brought me here and I have turned into a reed, he sings, forgetting to fear the giant’s reprisal, leg-dangling above ground, looking the actress sharp in the eyes, but now the storm gathers, so sweetly he sings, do not deracinate, batting eyelashes and hands together pleading please spare me a return on darkening clouds, O beholder of my misfortunes, that Sharmilla raises her hand and touches my father’s forehead.
I will take no action against or on your behalf, she says, but you cannot stay here.
Th-hic you, he says, and he bows and bids them goodbye. The giant, he notices, is not so tall after all, since he fits in the studio room with inches to spare above his head, though he is indeed broad as a barrel, and with indecipherable scripture painted all across his body. The actress, if we are to cast in her direction a few meagre words that will no doubt fail to capture her beauty in human presence: no, let us refrain, for already he is outside and walking quickly.
Mamun Ben Jaloun threads the alleyways and passes movie sets and wires and lights strewn about, of simulated rooms in houses blending with fake courtrooms and schools, hospitals and prisons, painted backdrop landscapes under which there lie other landscapes that can be rolled over to reveal still more scenery, and he wonders in which of these places he may house himself for a night’s rest.
Is that him: a loud cry from under a streetlamp: a crowd of flashlights, latis or sticks, lathis or kicks, stones for added measure, and my father must take to the wind once again to avoid attack. There he goes: gambolling across the Mediterranean, flying around the world, now in Constantinople, if that is a real place, dangling next from the chandelier of a Central Asiatic palace belonging to a Tartar emperor, boot-hopping across the Chukchi Sea, knocking over boom mikes and papier-mâché mountains, whole forests and ravines, skyscrapers and monorails. They chase and chase him. And he runs or flies, all the while singing. He sings, which may have helped him travel faster and faster until they were so far in the past he could not see even a single pair of chasing feet or hear a crying throat, no lathis or mobs or Pantagruel guards anywhere.
Exhausted, he fell into the ample lap of a woman with wide parted thighs, sitting on the bare floor of an emptied warehouse containing a single camera situated on a dolly track and on whose rear wall was a blank canvas framed by a white plaster parget border. She was minding her own business, stroking several young dogs, which fled upon his rude entrance. She had a kindly laugh, however, and did not mind the intrusion.
She held my father tightly until he cried like a baby: Tell me your name. She would not let him go until he complied.
And yourself, he twisted in her grasp, held her to the question indignantly by clogging her nostrils with two fingers.
Me, she cried with a snort and a piggish squeal at his mirror inquiry: Who am I. Why I’m Lady Jerusalem, everybody knows me.
My father removed his fingers from her nose and wanted to relax in Lady Jerusalem’s strong fleshy arms, which held him so tightly he nearly fell choking asleep, and perhaps he did, for a minute or an hour, but a din woke him too soon.
The young dogs had returned. Oh it’s time for their milk, she said, and got up onto her feet, yet from where in this wilderness would she find such a thing as milk.
Upon her release all the blood readjusted to its proper places in Mamun Ben Jaloun’s body. He saw now that on the back wall there was a switch that Lady Jerusalem touched before stepping gingerly out of the way. The floor over there began to move as if to the whims of a controlled minor earthquake. And Mamun realized that part of the ground on which he sat belonged to the outer section of a circle, while the parget-framed white canvas at the rear belonged to its inner remainder, on which was situated a panorama of two halves, the first of which was the hitherto described warehouse space, exchangeable at the flick of a switch with a second a domestic exhibit, furnished lightly but still outfitted with a gas stove, a cot, a small bookshelf half-stocked with volumes whose titles were unreadable, and a refrigerator.
Come on, sweeties, Lady Jerusalem said as the six or seven dogs crowded around her. She shut the fridge door and poured milk straight into their throats from the height of her ear and they caught its stream, rarely missing, and licking up the few errant spilled drops. Then she rustled up some greens and fried up a few fish steaks in olive oil with garlic on the gas stove before adding vinaigrette: A salad, she offered, as if she often entertained guests this way.
It seemed natural that they should share her cot, and when the contents of the fridge thinned, a grocer boy arrived ringing his bicycle bell and produced a rye loaf from his front basket, dried apricots and figs, fresh lobster caught just yesterday in the Indian Ocean, ma’am.
How does she procure the necessary income, he wondered, but knew it would be rude to ask.
I am allotted a stipend by the studio, she explained on her own as they supped on a lamb and mint dish. I shadow an actress, Sharmilla, you may have heard of her, I have been performing her dance routines for years; we cut a similar enough figure, though our faces differ, you might have noticed if you have seen even one of her films—our films, she corrected. I am waiting for the Director to shoot the next scene. It’s a musical, of course, and a domestic scene, and I don’t mind rehearsing the role, she glanced at him sharply.
Mamun Ben Jaloun assented with a nod: having been chased by guards and then a stick-wielding mob across what seemed like the whole world, the company of a kindly shadow dancer was a welcome change. And, in a way, they were free: surrounded by only three walls, not by the regular four that construct every domicile and prison, and while passersby could come and go and watch as they pleased, Mamun Ben Jaloun adjusted even to the idea that secretaries and clipboard holders would arrive from time to time in the most intimate moments to count down the hours before filming, signalling makeup artists who, with garrulous chatter, would improve Lady Jerusalem’s appearance with a few dabs of colour, and lighting staff who would shine thousands of volts onto their living quarters and exchange any hour for high noon.
The fulfilling event, however, never occurred: the makeup artists and members of the film crew always disappeared, the scene was never filmed, and for two or three days afterward, Lady Jerusalem sulked and ate tinned mussels one can after another until, bloated, she would lie moaning and begging to be administered an emetic.
Mamun did not mind caring for her on these occasions, and did so tenderly, kissing her eyelids and midriff: Sleep, it will pass.
One night American bombs fell onto the studios some miles away, and the microcosmos burned, whole countries disappeared; the moon, cardboard and two-dimensional palaces were ruined, thousands of costumes and characters turned to cinder. On that night, Lady Jerusalem’s kisses tasted of explosive jetsam, ash, she was a baker, or worse yet, the oven, and he was the smouldering bread. As they huddled together under the cover of the kitchen table, he felt shrunken, as if held by the walls of a deep furnace. He longed to make blinding steps, let loose a song and hurry from this place. But he stayed. Thereafter, her embraces and kisses, every extended contact, in fact, asphyxiated him.
While it was true her physical presence was not overwhelming in sight and she remained what he considered attractive by her hair and her smells and so forth, her mouth became like a vacuum that threatened to suck away his very life with each kiss. For hours afterward, he would sit at the edge of the cot while she smacked his back with a flat palm, as he tried to recover his voice and the wind in his lungs. When he recovered, he related his difficulties to her while she assumed her prior problems, which this time were so crippling that for the first time he thought of calling paramedics, but where could they be found in this part of the studio when the fires were still going on elsewhere. Thankfully, the crisis passed and they lived together for several months
more, though in chaste circumstances, during which time the young dogs visited more often, and sometimes displayed great animosity toward him.
Know at that age, Mamun Ben Jaloun had no ambitions to become a playback singer, and we can imagine he would never have done so had he stationed himself indefinitely with Lady Jerusalem. Luckily, he was arrested not too long after.
One day there arrived a man garbed in exceedingly wide-legged bells, which were the style of the era. Above his shoulders he had thrown a long grey shawl, more like a cloak, and he stood at the open wall, smartly saluted to no one before letting loose a scroll that dragged along the ground like the longest lie. He read from that indecipherable document with its many since-therefores and notwithstandings, which apparently justified what happened next: eight or nine trolls, or little children, drew from under his loose pants and from the folds of his cloak and climbed all over Mamun Ben Jaloun and overwhelmed him, held his eyes shut and dragged him away from the screaming Lady Jerusalem, rendered helpless and held in place by the remainder of the document, which named her and kept her there.
The dolly track, it would appear, also serves as an internal rail line, as indicated by the small engine comes into view, pulling behind it a dozen or so bathtub gondola cars, and our hero soon finds himself transported jhigjhig-takrtakr, jhigjhig-takrtakr, across green fields of sorghum and gilded paintings of fonio and wheat, or perhaps the latter too are real, as he leaves behind Lady Jerusalem, who seems deeply affected by his sudden capture.