by Ghalib Islam
The verses are coming along. He has the secretary recite them back and make corrections on the page. It is a slow and expensive process since the woman charges by the hour, but since she is patient and since Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s costs have expanded only slightly in his new job, which is not at all new anymore, he doesn’t mind. He has invested deeply in rhythm, but is worried he is sacrificing the narrative thread for the sake of sound.
The story is about a man who discovers his shadow moving about one evening on its own accord. The change is subtle at first, but eventually the shadow achieves a voice and declares independence from the protagonist’s body. A struggle ensues. To keep the identity of the doppelgänger shadow hidden, the hero assumes the motions of his other the shadow, which extends into murder, among other evils. Eventually, he is tried for his crimes, and the story is told again, but in differing versions, by other characters, some of whom plead his innocence and advocate for his release. But the subtleties, Zachariah worries, and the others who provoke or assist or act as foils, are not yet clear.
Facsimile, he ran the word along his tongue, facsimile; it provided him an explanation of things, of what he didn’t know: signification without signifier, conclusion without premise, though he knew it was right. Meanwhile, the minds he encounters on the shortwave multiply into identical similitude, many petals on the same bough. Not to say that as surveyor Zachariah Ben Janoun does not discover distinguishing characteristics of the minds he encounters. In the more recently employed, he notices a sharpness and desire for experimentation that older employees lose as they accustom themselves to common practices and set ways of functioning. He gathers admissions: they do not always know of the accuracy of their findings and rely on assemblers to edit their discoveries into stories. They are all self-enclosed and lonely, many of them frightened of speaking to him as they are to all supervisors, let alone so candidly about the functionality of their minds. He wanders from one to the next, there are thousands of cubicles branching into identical others and he will never finish. Thousands of names minds nuances locations he must how can he remember them all. He does not care where is she.
Fifty weeks pass this way in idle repetition. In Europe, the British have proclaimed victory over the fascist scourge, and the news leaks into the streets of the unnameable country, which is far away and where it means less, as half-hearted hurrahs, weak bursts of firecracker and Roman candle. The Governor, as they have begun calling Anwar, the man with the single name, has not yet launched his ultimately cannibalistic self-consuming revolution. The Black Organs are almost born. Then one day Zachariah Ben Janoun is shaken back into Ben Jaloun as he enters a cubicle and a pair of tired grey eyes stare back. He stifles a desire to weep and to be alone while eating a large onion, but gathers his senses and repeats what he has said to all the others, routine questions.
Be honest, he adds, believe me the way you handle the dial is beyond my capacity, and we—he assumes the form of the Department— are very interested in your.
How do you know my knowledge of the instrument is superior, she is incredulous, suspicious.
Ben Janoun retains his air of modest authority and assures her whatever he is doing is beyond my control, comes from higher offices of power, he is saying.
She nods, this much she understands, and takes a breath before telling him: Usually, I focus on the quieter sections between suchandsuch a hertz and allow errant, more powerful thoughts to emerge as interferences in the static; these provide clues and I home in closer with the dial before the shapes begin to emerge.
Shapes.
Yes, shapes, she says, though more like colourshapes and patterns, she twists in her chair, very uncomfortable to continue, which is to say I see more than I hear.
What do you mean, Ben Janoun is puzzled. He has never received such an answer.
I mean I see the conversations people have with themselves, and sometimes I can catch glimpses of the contour of whole minds.
But do you hear what they are saying.
In fact, it is hearing, she insists.
Please forgive me, Zachariah is stunned, but I don’t process.
She shrugs. I can’t explain; it’s simply the way I do my job.
For two long moments no words pass and they do not look at each other.
Can I have your name, please, Zachariah Ben Janoun says finally, I will have to report this.
Am I to be reprimanded, is this not the correct manner of proceeding, please understand I cannot lose this job.
Believe me, as far as I can help it you will not lose your job over what appears as an elegant and unique manner of collecting information on the minds of potential terror subjects.
She is visibly relieved. My name is Gita, she tells.
Ah, Gita. At last we discover. Gita or Geeta like geet any song or the song of arjunandkrishna.
I don’t recall ever noticing your face, Gita says, were you recently hired or transferred.
The latter, yes, from Assembly, but not so recently, several years ago.
I see.
And yourself.
I work in Collections, I have been in the same cubicle for nearly five years.
They more or less know these preliminaries, they are not the most important questions, but necessary. He wanted to reveal they had encountered each other several times, and that one occasion she had inflicted him with a wounded stomach, that now he was delighted they were speaking, but what is the point of speaking on such things, and he asked instead: If you do not mind, just because of your accent, you are not from our country.
No, I’m originally from Cox’s Bazaar.
And where is that.
The coast of the Bay of Bengal.
Ah.
And since in such situations all premeditated questions flee the scene for politeness, Zachariah Ben Jaloun stalls, and wonders whether Gita has anything else to add. Then unexpectedly she laughs, and the sound is bolder than he would have expected, and wrapped in a slight husk absent from her speaking voice. He does not join her but is content to enjoy the sound.
FIRE IN THE ENDLESS MOVIE STUDIO
A VISIT HOME
Time passes, stories lead us; when they feel fit, they call us back. To your knowledge, my grandparents met in a building where they listen inside people’s skulls, a palace of ears that call eyes and limbs, truncheons, bullets, nightly kidnappings out into the world, a building of machines that make and multiply fear. Which wild eyes could spot love or a chance caress in such a place of ordered misery, of daily vortexes that suck you inside its walls because it’s your time, for no other reason than because your number is called and time to die.
My grandparents lived. My grandfather died an ownbulleted death many years later (because he lost Gita, lost everything many years earlier). He was made into pieces, shipped eventually by Department 6119 to my grandmother, who emerged from her solitude at the sight of his eternal face in a duffle bag, carved into such thin slices the incisions were initially difficult to spot; only when Gita tried to raise him out of the bag did she realize what he had become, because Zachariah Ben Jaloun slipped as meat through her hands.
Years later, after watching her grandson Hedayat grow old enough to dance gangster-steps with his friend Niramish, Grandmother Song would, with her daughter-in-law, my Mother Thankyou, warn us against our football-bag excesses, our solitary conversations behind closed doors, though neither we nor anyone in the unnameable country knew then what even Hedayat only suspected, what he would gather in a spontaneous gaze of total understanding exactly a moment too late: his friend was about to get his brains blown out. When Hedayat found a partner in grime and underworld after Niramish’s death, he kept Masoud Rana and the Datsun out of his family’s knowledge as much as possible for all the badnaam they might heap upon the unsuspecting.
Eventually, Hedayat did pay a visit home, hoping all was well and expecting to see it overrun like a seabed with the scuttling papers of his father’s contract work. Recall my grandmother�
�s home was an abandoned movie set, rented to immigrants at a time when cameras were large, clunky, expensive. By the time Hedayat became a man running guns and pepper through the Warren tunnels, cameras and microphones had miniaturized and multiplied ubiquitous.
All I heard when I entered my parents’ home was a low ominous hum and could see no papers anywhere, nor any workmen. Changes: coloured markings on the floor, curious glass partitions, and a man seated at a chair before the first of these and right near the steps, holding a flat elongated grey instrument. He called me to halt and passed it around my body; it twittered like an electrical bird, all agitated, frenetic around my pockets. He had me show him my keys and all the coins and safety pins and whatever other metal objects before it became safe to pass. I recall he wore a nametag on his blue uniform with no name.
The small apartment had grown cavernous in my absence, seemingly much larger because much of the furniture had been removed since I last visited. There was no one, and the floor was covered in the grey shit clouds of perfumed mountain swallow chicks that were cheeping and pecking at flaxen seeds scattered everywhere. My father appeared like an apparition out of a corner of the house that was unfamiliar to me, with an unrecognizable expression on his face. There were rooms and they were difficult to know.
Did you come back for long.
I am here now, I said. The house is a prison now, why are there perfumed chicks feeding everywhere on seeds, cheeping and befouling the floors. Where are the others, I asked when he didn’t reply to the first question.
My father pointed to some forgotten corner of the universe, and it was a good thing the Quintuplets entered the room at that moment, because I could have sworn I was in the wrong house and with the opposite truth in mind I might have left with the intention never to return. They were the same, the four of them taller, though no less quiet, and the fifth, who was higher like the rest and still as silent, still swimming in an irrepressible inner world of which one caught glimpses. Without a salutation the Yeas threw down their schoolbags and bugled in unison some song they had learned in physical education or extracurricular that was about sweeping, what fun time is sweeping time, that was the refrain while the rest of the lyrics also had to do with cleaning, there was a line about the centipedes and the rats, which they sang with sweet diligence and these had to be swept, as well as notice the streets should be clean and one’s house clean, the country and the heart unwell if not lathered up from time to time, a line about the mutinous grass also and why it should be cropped.
I might not have minded if the tune weren’t so predictably repetitive, and it seemed odd to me that they would want to sing it instead of other possible songs; it was a good thing, anyway, Nehi was there to break the annoying number, which also featured a horse-galloping dance. She placed the quizzical have you seen. I hadn’t and looked to the odd corner, where she pointed, where there was now a large elevator at the far end of the space that had once housed their cribs, their playthings, and later their desks.
So what do you do now, I asked.
Nothing until after six o’clock, when they’ve brought back all the furniture. She informed that the prison’s budget had been mismanaged and the new penitentiary was leasing all the family’s belongings until the Ministry of Profits could decide how to allocate the necessary funds; Nehi bore through the intimate procedural details, listed names of bureaucrats as well as dates and times and reasons provided, and they haven’t paid us once, she concluded, looking at our father.
True but moreorless true, Mamun M was chewing the cud of his frustrations, rolling his tongue left and right cheek, hard to argue with the child when she’s in her, one of those, though consider they leave us these perfumed mountain swallow chicks as collateral every morning, and I doubt it’s a swindle since we also get it back.
True as his word, the largemetal doors opened promptly sometime around six o’clock and brawny musclebound warders, untalkative and greyclothed, shuffling and dragged out a whole apartment from within what looked less like an elevator and more like a submarine’s interior. They had even set things up so there was a rug in place and lamps and the couch was pushed back against the wall of the dining area, and they gathered up all the cheeping swallows into the folds of their clothes and pushed them into their pockets, which left only their grey clouds and the beads of sunlight seeds across the floor.
I had meant to visit only for two nights at most, but when I tried to leave, the first gatekeeper, the one with the grey beeping instrument and his left twisted ear like a demented cauliflower, which was not like before, told me that, in fact, he was another man and didn’t recognize me, I had no identification and he couldn’t let me pass until the return of his superior, who was the first of the guards I had encountered.
When is that.
Unsure, could be tomorrow but no since the Friday is after and then the closesttime Monday following, but possibly not.
At first Hedayat busied himself with the mountain swallows, but there were so many of them, and though flightless, they had a way of evading touch with such ease that after a while he had to satisfy himself only with scattering their flaxen seeds and clearing their shit, which dissolved into dust putrefaction if left too long, because then we would be breathing it.
Restlessness clasped around his ankles and he dragged the whole musical heavy weight of it from one glass enclosure to another. In the mornings they came to take away the furniture, his father went off to the storage room of the local police division, where they had created a small workspace for him to gather and arrange the data of the city’s latest gangs and kleptocrats, his mother and grandmother went downstairs to open the hosiery shop, and the Quintuplets went to school. By the hum and banging of the ever-expanding prison deep below, which had never been completed and which they would be building forever, he leafed through the explorers’ magazines Mamun had bought for their precise high-resolution satellite images; eventually, he learned to identify every island of the Philippine archipelago, every urban centre town hamlet and road of the new world, before discovering a magnifying glass so powerful, it allowed him to explore the whole earth down to the details of the very hairs on the heads of the people as they walked frozen in their native streets or the smells of their meals at the time the pictures were taken. He inhaled with his boredom an agitation that found release only by singing the lowest registers of his range, and this way he rattled all the glass and brought the workmen deep below to curious pauses.
One day, two warders arrived, and a third. Not unlike the daily movers, but with crueller faces, they brought with them the music of loud jangle keys as they pushed in front of them a hooded man, whose legs were bound by real, not invisible, shackles; they paused before Hedayat to ask for directions to the elevator. All the mountain swallow chicks gathered cheeping around the three men, two of whom kicked nasty, while Hedayat pointed beyond several glass partitions. The birds followed the zigzag coloured markings on the floor, and when the hooded man faltered over a rough area on the floor, they beat him on his back and the back of his neck to disabuse him of failure until he was vomiting into his hood of stale socks and rotten colons, which was easy to smell all throughout the house. They halted for some time before the elevator without removing the hood, trampling on errant mountain swallow chicks, talking loudly about various things, whistling non-melodies, and never allowing the hooded man a moment’s respite. Then they disappeared into the mineshaft of hell without turning a look around.
Each evening, at the changing of the guards, I would look for signs of differences in the twisted cauliflower ear, the moustache and gesticulations of the returning guard, but found none; he grew tired of asking are you the one and being told no, the other one, so that on the day things changed, Hedayat didn’t notice until the differences in the pieces on the chessboard, which was also there before, though I did not mention; recall now: located on a low table in dramatic contrast with the very high chair of teetering daddy-long-legs for the guards.
Remember, I had passed a glance at the game, which had seemed in its advanced stages; now I saw that white had moved queen-side bishop to fianchetto in an angular defence against the black knight’s advances on his castle-piece.
But your rook is still, I told him, and he bemoaned he knew of the danger. I watched as he thought about the move he had made, though it was clear he wouldn’t make alterations, for that was what had been decided between he and his colleague, that they would not; and besides how could he while separated by such a distance from the low table while sitting on his very high metal chair with its teetering skinny legs.
After collecting my thoughts through our brief conversation about the game, I began to describe being marooned in my own home, including my inability to move freely between all the glass panes, the coloured markings that were transparent in meaning even to birds, daily disappearance of all the furniture, the odd appearance of two warders and a hooded man, as well as the ubiquitous presence of the cheeping mountain swifts and their habit of shitting on the floor of the house. While I related these absurd things, the guard would move chess pieces back and forth by bending over and extending a hand several feet beyond its actual length with surprising skill, and flatulate loudly at precise instances in my story. His wind had no odour but I grew concerned that the sounds were produced to censor critical moments of my narrative, a way for him to erase them from future possible recollection.
Are you listening, I shouted.
I am not only, in fact I was once a court stenographer and possess a ninety-five percent rate of recollection, he said, as if to counter my fears.
So what have I been telling.
A tale of eternal childish longing.