by Ghalib Islam
Hedayat pushed the door open and the others who were flung into the room with him ran out immediately, crying anxiously, accursed place. Inexplicably, the heavy metal door slammed shut. When he found his feet again, he walked slowly because he had to part the dense shadows with his hands before he could see the first wall twenty feet away with its grey spines adjacent to one another like books until the next crowded wall of rectangular shapes separated by an indentation, walkways through which one could see walls coming and going, intersecting perpendicular in soft light. Dead light in the distance, rested ancient thoughts. Fluorescent lights high above.
Soft pebbly light fell onto the floor. Rough steps, Hedayat stumbled in a narrow passage. Clangour as he stepped foot over foot tripping foot, and something fell onto the floor. He stared at the rows of nocturnal shelves on either side of him. Then another sound, a syllable or rock hurled somewhere behind him against a metal case. Where am I, he thinks. Where is Hedayat.
I am in a dead world, I mused, without corpses, only coffins and tombstones. If there is life after death here, it is hidden and much bigger than the living world, a collection of all the minds on magnetic reel. The Mirror wants to be this place, Hedayat shivered, it wants every thought in every jar. Hedayat recalled how when they tortured him they showed him his life’s most intimate moments. He thought how his heart fumbled when he saw the male protagonist, Hedayatesque, on television patting sheets in an empty bed in the middle of the dark. Recall his rage and confusion at how could they know and take my deepest fears of being deserted by her. The Mirror wants moments like that, he thought, to multiply a billion times bigger by ingesting all the realities that were and are, might have been and could be in the unnameable country, where traces of histories my glossolalist tongue never ventured to describe exist somewhere in this haunted library, where even traces of non-lives must exist on thoughtreel.
What would have happened, I ask, if my grandmother had never surrendered her shoe servant’s job and migrated to the unnameable country. Would her bejewelled grey eyes have haunted Zachariah Ben Jaloun. Imagine, even after arriving at our shores, my grandmother finds her first weeks of life in the Ministry of Records and Sources so stifling she chooses to apply at the Bata department store near her home, and that after repeated visits to insist upon the strength of her footwear credentials, she earns a salesperson’s job.
As this version of the story goes, she never ends up meeting Zachariah Ben Jaloun’s border crossing, never goes to his standalone café either, where instead of drowning in onion-tears, in this version of things, he decides not to break things off with one Marjane B, theatre reviewer for the Victoria Star, Benediction Post, and assorted literary magazines, his fling directly prior to our story, a relationship unsettled by squabbles of the working poor, and which, it must be noted, was the cause of his hallucinogenic poetry in his volume Orange Blossoms.
In this version of the story, Marjane’s work in literature, her publicist’s charm, helps the book catch lucky break after lucky break and become a national and international hit. Zachariah files for temporary leave from his border guard’s post and starts writing fiction and poetry full-time, furiously. Marjane and Zachariah move into an intimate, clean little flat where, soon, along comes a baby in swaddling clothes. Barely minutes newly born, still wet with mother water, what shall we call him, Marjane asks. Zachariah disappears into the recesses of some parallel consciousness: Mamun, he says.
What if my grandmother and grandfather never met is what Hedayat means. Hedayat spins glossolalist in the airless Archives, lets himself feel the eeriness for one moment of having never been born, unruly free, unhindered by even the prison walls of the human heart or body.
I, if that is the proper term, wander thinking, hunting Ariadne thread for a clue out of this labyrinth of thoughts, its door shut firmly behind me, the Assistant Supervisor or his superior nowhere to be found, and its future of wandering twisting miles, millennia in search of my beginning, as I think and hope that though Zachariah might have biting onions into verses better with Marjane and Zachariah’s détente, his border guard boss would probably one day have ordered him into Department 6119’s dungeon due to reasons beyond them both, that Gita with the grey eyes and my grandfather would surely eventually have made Mamun out of kisses and kismet. I rest my hand against a shelf of metal receptacles: and we have another generation to go before Hedayat, I think, before Hedayat’s big bang, years’ out of gestation in an unnameable sky that still sets fire to millions of people below, before the involuntary contractions of my mother’s body shiver and ache on a flying carpet that Alauddin the magician drives, as you know, before her howl with eyes poised above at the airless oblivion, as
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author would like to thank friends, family, teachers, warm restaurants, welcoming homes, a half-dozen laptops desktops personal computers, my mother, without whose moral guidance and financial support I would have withered at the basement stage of creativity, my father’s uncanny endurance, the encouragement of an octogenarian great-uncle who declared immortality to my face, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Garfinkel, a tremendous writer and true friend, and Nicole Winstanley.
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc.
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Canada Books Inc.
90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 707 Collins Street, Melbourne, Victoria 3008, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park,
New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank,
Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published 2014
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)
Copyright © Ghalib Islam, 2014
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Islam, Ghalib, author
Fire in the unnameable country / Ghalib Islam.
ISBN 978-0-670-06700-8 (bound)
I. Title.
PS8617.S54F57 2014 C813’.6 C2013-908156-9
Visit the Penguin Canada website at www.penguin.ca
Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477.
: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share