Dharma Sutra

by David Pugh

  ‘How do we end this battle?’

  ‘By death!’ Amdou replies, ‘It is the only way that wars are won.’

  ‘Time and place?’ I reply.

  ‘The 4H,’ the Chink says, ‘you wanted the place, come and get it, winner takes it all.’

  ‘Look out for me and my army at noon tomorrow,’ I reply; turning my back on all of them, I leave the room a different man.

  Chapter 65: Eve of War

  Molefi’s Diary, Sylvia’s Bedroom at the 4H

  ‘You know, Sylvia, I think you may be on medically shaky grounds about this penis stitching thing, there’s no research been done into it.’

  ‘What the hell, it worked,’ she replied, ‘Bob has been called out; he has to finish this game on our terms.’

  ‘War is not a game,’ I sighed, ‘I have been there, people die, too many innocent people.’

  The evening was spent discussing tomorrow’s battle with the major players. Amdou wanted to bring in some of the Dibba family who had been trained in warfare. Sylvia explained that they must make it look like an unprovoked attack on the hotel by a greedy land-grabbing bastard, who had overstretched himself. I had been living at the 4H for some time, so it was no surprise that I was involved, Jack and John worked for her, so it was equally logical that they should be there when the attack occurred. Remus’ sons have been trained by Amdou in the use of hunting rifles, to protect safari tourists. They know how to bring down a hippopotamus, probably the most dangerous animal in Africa, excepting of course the human. Our worry was that Edgar wanted to be one of the combatants; his mother was very much against it.

  Edgar spoke up, ‘Look, I really like what we have here, we are giving Western people a chance to live life at its most basic, and they go home with a very different perspective on their life. I’ve invested so much of myself into the 4H and the Jungle Stays project, I don’t intend to go back to the UK and look for another direction. Amdou here has taught me how to use a hunting rifle too, he’s been part of making me the man I am today. Besides, the girls really go for my Johnny Depp take on the White Hunter.’

  We all laughed and shook his hand but his mother still looked grieved.

  I explained to the three boys and to Bouba that they had never killed a man and on the morrow many innocent boys would die, as a result of a foolish land struggle. Bob would recruit lots of bumsters from the beach by giving each a gun and a large packet of dalasi. He had given himself no time to recruit professionals, the boys would surge through the gate and would have to be killed; it was a big responsibility they were taking on. The poor young innocents would see themselves as Jimmy Cliff, taking on the police at the end of The Harder They Come, not even knowing or caring whether they were the good guys or the bad. I told them of the years of nightmares I had had to overcome to bring about the cold-hearted killer they saw in front of them that day. Despite my preaching they were all resolved to stay.

  ‘Right then, there are seven of us and as I see myself as Chris, the Yul Brynner character, in John Sturges’ brilliant 1960 film The Magnificent Seven, I get to survive. I guess you’ve all seen that film, do remember that four of them die.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to be Steve McQueen,’ Edgar said, ‘Vin Tanner survives and McQueen becomes a screen icon.’

  ‘And gets a slow death from cancer,’ Bouba put in, ‘better to die gloriously in battle!’

  ‘I hope and pray none of us will die,’ Sylvia added, ‘I’m feeling responsible for putting you all in danger.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Amdou, ‘My fight is not for the 4H, it is against Bob and what he did to our brother.’

  ‘Perhaps we should have killed him today,’ Bouba added, ‘that way there would be no deaths at all at noon tomorrow.’

  I had to agree with Bouba’s sentiments, we should have lived with the consequences of killing Bob and possibly even his mother. What he forgot was that others would be implicated, including the innocent Colonel Kamara Ceesay; The Gambia has the death penalty for conspiracies. It would have been likely that five people and even the three boys in that room could have been put before a firing squad. Better to fight on the morrow, so we began our defence plan.

  We cleared the Jallow household and our own vehicles from the compound, locking the main gate, the only entry point. High walls, topped with razor wire, surrounded the property, to keep out thieves. Amdou produced five landmines, they are cheap here and easily accessible after the Casamance clearances.

  ‘Do we have to use those things, I hate them?’ Sylvia looked horrified, ‘Jeffrey and I once travelled in Cambodia and met a young palm tapper, like Remus…he was wearing one Wellington boot, I asked him why. He took it off and showed us a home-made wooden leg, those bloody mines did that!’

  ‘Bob will ram the gate with an armoured jeep,’ Amdou indicated the double door, ‘We line two of these up with the tyres, then three more for the ground troops.’

  ‘Young boys!’ Sylvia protested.

  ‘Tomorrow they will be soldiers,’ I reassured her, ‘and soldiers are paid to die for their cause.’

  ‘If another vehicle tries to enter, then we have this,’ Amdou introduced a classic bazooka from the 1990s. Modern armies don’t use them anymore; they are too heavy, they use one-off lightweight disposable, if rather expensive, rocket launchers. War is good business, Britain in particular knows the value of keeping it alive and the UK is bloody good at perfecting new ways of killing. Bazooka tourism is also good business in former war zones, there’s a travel company in the Casamance that operate one-day bazooka tours out of Cap Skirring beach resort. They drive eager war gamers into the bush to blow the hell out of any wildlife they find; the Americans love it in particular. This bazooka would be operated by Amdou out of the main house, in line with the gate. Amdou liked the idea of bazooka tourism but had suggested that Sylvia should pursue the less controversial machine-gun tourism, very popular in the Philippines. He had presented her with a rather lovely British Vickers mounted machine-gun, water-cooled and in perfect working order, along with dozens of boxes of ammunition. Very easy to maintain, it fires around 450–600 rounds a minute and can shoot 10,000 rounds in one hour. The barrel can be changed in two minutes; thoughtfully, Amdou had also provided a replacement barrel. Sylvia hated the thing but Edgar and the Jallow boys loved it, they kept it maintained and in pride of place above the 4H bar, ammunition securely locked away from over-enthusiastic revellers. On the morrow it too would be placed in the main house, manned by Bouba, who had practiced with it in the bush, using dozens of printouts of Bob’s face as targets. That next day all the bumsters would have Bob’s face, it was going to be his strategy for aiming true.

  The compound almost formed a classic Zulu attack formation, but we would use it for defence. The blockhouses formed the horns, the main house the head; the blockhouses have no back access, just small bathroom windows. To comply with hotel safety standards, for what they were worth in The Gambia, each self-contained suite had an inter-connecting door, useful for large family lets. All the doors would be open at the beginning of the attack. Sylvia and Edgar would position themselves with two hunting rifles each in the first room of A block and the Jallow boys in the opposite room in block B. As the battle progressed, they would move down to the next room, locking the steel connecting door behind them. The main house had a small clock tower on the roof, with enough space for me to hide myself, direct the battle by mobile phone and act as sniper. If I could get Bob Jatta with a well-placed bullet to the head, then perhaps no one else needed to die. All we had to do that evening was block the alleys from blocks A and B with sandbags, to allow the blockhouse combatants safe passage from the guest rooms to the main house for a final confrontation, if it should come to that. We had several rehearsals of the fight, wearing full-body armour and helmets, which Sergeant Amdou had provided with the aid of Sylvia’s money. Each time the mock battle went well but in real life there was always one thing which is unexpected. It would be my job to allow for that
and take appropriate swift action or things could go badly wrong.

  We retired early, I warned the boys not to drink too much, as their lives would be dependent on them being quick reacting. Sylvia and I retired to her new suite in the main house, where we made the most passionate love, as if it was our last time.

  Chapter 66: It’s Five O’clock Somewhere

  Jeffrey’s Journal, Puri, India

  I was sitting on Issa’s beach at 4.30pm I hadn’t seen him for days, and I decided to walk to the closest off-shop for a sundowner beer. They only had Haywards 5000 beer and it was well past its sell-by date. I did point this out and the owner pointed towards the next shop about three-quarters of a mile away. I bought two bottles on the off chance that Issa would show, if he didn’t I would happily finish both.

  ‘What time zone am I on? What country am I in?’ sang a familiar voice, quoting the Jimmy Buffet, Alan Jackson song.

  ’It doesn’t matter, it’s five o’clock somewhere,’ I replied, ‘and today it is actually five o’clock here in Puri, welcome back, Issa, I’ve missed you.’

  ‘There was a time when you would have never said that,’ Issa smiled, ‘I see you’ve got me a beer.’

  I handed him the still cold Haywards, ‘I’m feeling scared, my friend.’

  ‘Yes, it’s time to worry, one of those days you dread is here,’ Issa put a hand on my brow, ‘it’s a day of transition for you, we all have them, some joyous some sad, some expected and some not.’

  ‘You can tell me, you know what’s about to happen, tell me?’ I pleaded with him.

  ‘I told you, nothing is certain, outside forces intervene to throw off the cosmic balance. Baba Jan Singh told you you’d live to be eighty-nine, didn’t he? Perhaps you will and perhaps you won’t, perhaps you won’t want to,’ he looked through me, like I was being x-rayed.

  ‘It really doesn’t matter as I have told you, you are immortal, because everything you did or you’re yet to do is happening somewhere right now, it is five o’clock somewhere, a five o’clock of each day of your life and of your other lives. You may approach your eightieth birthday to find that you are losing your sight, a big fear with you, and you may choose to end things. You will, however, be only ending things for one of your lives, the greater essence of you is living a happy life somewhere and an even sadder life somewhere else. In these transition states, that you call death, you’ll be presented with all the lives you have lived or will live. If you can control this state of awareness, you can choose where YOU, the greater intellect, go next, past or future. You will have the ability to possess one of your other lives and go back or forward to influence that life with the knowledge you’ve acquired.’

  ‘I spot that you use the word influence and not change,’ this was very interesting and most distracting.

  ‘You cannot directly change the past or future, a pointer to a different direction is all you can offer. What you see as the universe out there is just your little mortal vision of the infinite possibilities. I’m offering you the opportunity to train yourself to see more than a collection of spheres bobbing around other spheres. If William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand, then what are you really seeing out there in the night sky?’

  Issa broke off to let me try to digest what he’d just said and asked me the time,

  ‘It’s five-thirty here in India,’ I answered.

  ‘Noon in The Gambia then,’ he stated.

  Chapter 67: High Noon at the Happy Hippo

  Molefi’s Diary, The Last Day

  ‘How is the shoulder, Bouba?’

  ‘Like they say in the Westerns, Molefi, just a scratch,’ he patted the Vickers, ‘it won’t stop me using this.’

  We were in one of the front bedrooms of the main house.

  ‘You like Westerns, Bouba? I hope my analogy to The Magnificent Seven doesn’t come too close,’ I smiled and continued, ‘do you know the body count for the final shoot out was fifty-five?’

  ‘Really, Major?’ Bouba looked heavenwards, ‘And like you said four of them were the good guys.’

  ‘I’m not a good guy by any means, Bouba.’

  ‘Neither was Chris, the leader,’ he replied, ‘he was a hired gunman, just like you, putting his life on the line to protect innocent people.’

  ‘He got paid!’ I looked serious.

  ‘Not very much, if I remember right,’ Bouba smiled.

  ‘Au contraire, mon frere,’ I’m feeling far from saintly, ‘the villagers gave him everything they had.’

  ‘So, you are no Gary Cooper then?’ Bouba grinned, ‘We could use him here as we are facing High Noon.’

  ‘I spotted that analogy too, and I wish I was his character, he kills all the bad guys and gets the girl.’

  ‘You may turn out to be him, Major, getting all the bad guys and Ms Sylvia.’

  ‘I’m worried about her, Bouba, she is too compassionate,’ this was the truth, ‘but this could be the Alamo, the only woman, the captain’s wife survived, all the men died an honourable death.’

  ‘Those men were not good guys; they stole the land from the Mexicans,’ Bouba Dibba surveyed the compound.

  ‘My friend, there are parallels here,’ I laughed, ‘you are defending a piece of Toubab land from a Gambian.’

  ‘That man is no Gambian, no African and no human!’ Bouba looked at the long barrel of the machine-gun, ‘It is such a pity that so many young men will die with him today, but they all know that they are working for an evil bastard!’

  I told him that they needed the money; it was the same desperation that drove them into flimsy boats to cross the Mediterranean, in hope of getting to England. England brought its language and religion here in 1816, with promises of a small country becoming part of a glorious empire. Eventually, The Gambia rebelled, shook off her colonial chains and her Christianity but exchanged it for far worse, dictatorship and the shackles of Islam. Africans only need the gods of the forest, who offer them healing medicines, the power of the roots of the land. The Abrahamic religions only offer delayed gratification, a reward in Heaven, while Africans believe, somewhat recklessly, in living life by the minute, because they truly believe that the minute is all they have. It is difficult for an impoverished people to plan for a future when they have no money to educate their children. It is far easier to believe that a better life will come after death, but Africans aren’t really that stupid, they know religion is a sham.

  I am a loner, born into a rich family I had been given the gift of choosing my way but what a way it has been! My Christian family calls me a sinner, which undoubtedly I am, but who are they to judge? They live their lives by their community standards, they say that God judges us all; that is not true, the community evaluates our worth to them. The rebel is always found wanting and labelled outsider, one doesn’t have to be a killer to get shunned, thinking outside the box, being an individual is crime enough to get you ostracised. Jeffrey Dharma was found as guilty by his community for finding his own spiritual way as I was for murdering dozens of people. Perhaps this was why the same woman loved us both.

  It was 11.15am so I checked everyone was in place and I made my way to the clock tower. Amdou had been watching there, next to the bell, in case Bob’s troops arrived early. I thought the attack would happen on the stroke of noon; Bob was like a film director, a control freak who obsessively stuck to a plan. Anyone who deviated from the Jatta plan was removed from the script. He would have choreographed the day’s battle, and it was my job as opposing director to anticipate his scenario.

  11.57am and we heard the rumble of a jeep, it was a Wrangler Apache, open-topped with a machine-gun mounted on the central roll bars, a formidable ram securely attached to the grill. If Amdou’s mines did their job, then we could take this thing out of the fight quickly. The mounted machine-gun opened fire at the steel doors, denting but with no serious damage; however, the hammering weakened the hinges. Surely I thought, the rat-tat-tat of the gun should have brought the police swarming around
the compound, but my guess was that Bob had already greased the right official palms and ensured that heads, ears and eyes would be turned away. The people were used to heavy-handed army raids.

  Part one of the plan stuck to our script, the jeep took out the gate, hit the two landmines and somersaulted backwards, taking out the hippopotamus statue. Shame about that, we should have moved the happy chappy, but if we survived this, we’d get Julbrew to make us another one. I’ve been using “we” and “us” very easily, it appeared that I had taken a side. The first wave of bumsters were removed from the day’s play by the remaining landmines. There must have been fifty boys out there, looking as if they should all like to run, but Shaft Man and Tosh, in heavy-duty armour, rallied them through the gate. The boys had been equipped with dark green motorbike helmets and what looked like aluminium-plated waistcoats. For God’s sake, they might as well have run in naked, as the first burst of Amdou’s machine-gun proved. The second wave died in an exploding mess of blood, the third wave turned to flee. Shaft Man and Tosh had taken position either side of the gateposts, shooting anyone who tried to run away. This was like the battle of the Somme, but I was guessing that Bob had got the boys high on a few hours of ganja smoking, to psyche them up for the fight. The third wave broke through, firing at the blockhouse windows, but our teams there had cut sniper holes in the steel shutters and picked off boys individually with the hunting rifles. I didn’t know how Edgar, the Jallow boys and Sylvia were going to live with the trauma that this day would cause them. Then my sole concern was for them to survive and aim true. As the wave of dead built up, the swarm reached as far as rooms A2 and B2, my troops fell back one, bolted the partition doors and continued their sniping. A second, more heavily armoured jeep approached the gate, maybe Bob was in this one I thought? The jeep pushed through the remains of jeep one, its machine-gun concentrating fire on the main house, which didn’t have the same protective shutters. Amdou fired the bazooka; the first shell fell short but took out a closely formed group of boys. His second shell hit true, the jeep rolled and burst into flame, taking with it more of the foot soldiers. I heard the buzz of a helicopter, I had anticipated this, which was why I had my own pride and joy, a .50-caliber M107 Barrett semi-automatic rifle, she was a beauty. I took aim at the chopper, but it was difficult to be accurate without anchoring it on its two leg supports. The pilot was good, using an unpredictable swerving motion; I did hit one of the legs, he’d find difficulty landing. That was not his intention, he dropped a grenade on the roof of A5, the last blockhouse room before the main house, the block Edgar and Sylvia were defending, his gunner raked the blockhouse roof. I’d repositioned the Barrett and the chopper took a major hit, it was rocking out of control. Don’t let it go down on A block’s roof! I prayed. No, the pilot had had enough and was taking off. Bob had some military training in his English public school, not a lot but enough to second-guess our tactics. It was instinctive that as Sylvia was the boss, she would be in block A, a stupid mistake which Bob had predicted. A second helicopter approached, firing all guns indiscriminately, only resulting in killing more of the ground troops. It was a massacre down there; Bouba was out of ammo and had taken up a rifle, trying to take out Shaft Man. Amdou was concentrating on Tosh, if they could kill those two, the boys would run. I was concentrating on the second helicopter, circling low near the hole in block A’s roof. A figure dropped and was through the hole!