by Paula Guran
A sound came from beside Noor. She turned. Tabinda’s face was doughy, a faint twitch at the left corner of her lips. Her forehead glistened with moisture. Her chubby hand was at her throat, massaging it vigorously.
She’s sweating, Noor thought with wonder. In this cold.
An unfamiliar dry smell flooded her nose, triggering memories that disappeared before she could seize them, leaving her breathless and frightened. Her eyes teared up from a sudden raging headache. Tabinda whispered – so softly Noor doubted anyone else heard. The words made the hair stand on the back of her neck. She would remember them later, like a dream song or a grief prayer running in her head again and again while the abandoned city rustled and the river stink of dead fish and reeds and gelatinous old creatures crept into her nostrils.
“He opens his mouth so,” said Tabinda. “The Terrible Emperor of the Night.”
The cadets held hands, bleary eyes peering in every direction. The ancient houses were entombed in night. Narrow alleys meandered off into the black. So much space devoid of life, yet something stirred; somewhere in the ruins Junaid stumbled, crashed, and cursed before falling silent.
Noor’s vision pulsed with her heartbeat.
“What’s happening, Miss?” cried one of the boys.
“To the bus,” she hissed. “Now.”
They gaped at her before turning and dashing to the vehicle. Falling over each other, they covered the distance in seconds, piled into the bus, burrowed into their seats. Noor slammed the lock home once Tabinda was aboard. They all stared at the mounds gleaming like gravestones in the moonlight.
“What was that?” said one cadet in a hitching voice.
“Someone turn on the light,” said another.
“No!”
“The boys,” Noor said. “Probably lost and calling for help.”
“By laughing? Are you fucking kidding me?” Tabrez said incredulously.
“Watch your language.”
“Screw that. Did you even hear it?” He leaned his brow against the window glass and gazed at the bonfire wavering by the citadel. “That wasn’t Abar. Didn’t even sound human.”
“I shouldn’t have returned. I thought, I thought . . . I was wrong,” Tabinda cried. She had sagged into a back seat. Her hands, like small animals, were hiding beneath her ample thighs.
Noor swallowed. Her lips were parched.
“Maybe an animal. A jackal perhaps,” she said.
“Didn’t sound like a jackal either,” Tabrez said. “Who was that man in the alley?”
The Terrible Emperor of the Night, Noor thought incoherently. She didn’t have the energy to grope her way back to question Tabinda. The woman was sunk in her seat, head lolling on her breasts like a rotten fruit.
Noor took note of the remaining water bottles under the bench behind the driver’s seat. Two twenty-four packs. She removed one, drank from it, passed it around. Someone made a choking sound then fell silent. Noor raised a fist and knuckled her throbbing right temple.
Tabrez rapped at his window with his knuckles. Someone told him to shut the fuck up. He glared back. Tap tap!
They waited for Junaid. Their breath misted the windshield glass and white sheathed it until their peering faces disappeared.
Tap tap. Tap tap tap.
Some time later sheermaal was handed around again. Noor declined the bread. An odd lethargy had settled on her. The kids chewed, filling the bus with sounds of gnashing teeth and crumpling aluminum. Noor’s neck ached as if steel rivets were being driven into it.
She fell into sleep.
She was a teenager – dressed in a black shirt, blue jeans, and leather boots – standing in the middle of Mohenjo-Daro with a bomb vest strapped under her clothes. Her hair whiplashed in the desert breeze. Her gaze was fixed on the citadel – now shaped like the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York, stripes of neon blue and red racing around its sides. Noor’s finger caressed the trigger poking her flat stomach. Her throat was dry.
A finger prodded her in the small of her back. Muneer. He was young and sallow, exactly how she remembered him. Eyes large and white from thyroid proptosis.
“For Dad,” he said, voice guttural, toad-like. He pointed a bitten fingernail at hundreds of skeletal men, women, and children twitching their way through sun-baked alleys. They wore business suits, sweatshirts, dresses, and tourist caps. Suitcases and backpacks dangled from bones picked clean by time. They converged at the terminal like pilgrims at the Kaaba, pawing at the steel armature, phalanges digging into bricks, clenched fists thudding on glass.
“For their sins. Go, little sister, go.” Muneer looked at her. His bulging eyes made him look shocked and insane. “Soon I will join you.”
He shoved her forward. She staggered and began to walk. The people of the city pounded on the walls of the terminal. The half-flesh on a few faces was swollen and distorted, washed by electrified colors blazing from the building’s facade. Noor’s vest was rough and heavy and it was difficult to breathe. It was summer. She was sweating. Her finger itched.
I can’t, she whispered. I don’t want to.
But no one was listening, not even God. Faith yanked her forward and she went on a loyal trot, getting closer to point zero. The crowd jittered to the tune of death. An infant drooped from his mother’s shoulder and pulled her straggly hair; and in a minute there would be blood, there would be devastation.
Noor turned and bolted. The ground shifted beneath her. Muneer’s face was everywhere. “No, you bitch, come back. Coward!” he screamed. The world was white noise and it hurt her head. She ran and ran and ran. She would hide somewhere; if she could just reach safety, everything would be all right. No pain, no suffering, no dying, no shame, no guilt. Noor sprinted and the dead sprinted behind her, hundreds of taluses, tarsals, and metatarsals rattling on the ground.
“Pashupati is dead, you miserable slut,” her brother shrieked. “He’s dead and nothing will do but youthful human blood.”
Noor woke, shivering. It was freezing and quiet. The bus was dark, the seats empty. Did Junaid return and take them all elsewhere? Why wouldn’t he wake her? Empty bottles, squares of foil, and sheermaal crumbs littered the bus floor. She pulled the shawl tight around her chest and struggled upright. The windows were blinded with white and for a moment she thought they were covered with snow like her bedroom window back in Hanover after a storm. Dad would clear it, his gloved hands patting the glittering frost off.
But Dad was gone. Extraordinary rendition, her lawyer called it.
She peered closely and saw the white was fog. Thick smoky layers pressed against the glass, consuming the bus. Sometime during the night it had crept in from the river. She glanced at her watch. It was just past midnight.
She wanted to turn the headlights on but was afraid of what she might see; the dream hadn’t left her yet. At least her headache was gone. She made her way to the exit and peered out: white upon pristine white. Wasn’t white the sum of all colors? Was it Goethe who said color itself was a degree of darkness? She couldn’t even see three feet away. There was a metallic tang in her mouth as if she could taste the vapor.
“Junaid,” she yelled. Instantly the fog devoured the cry. “Abar. Tabinda. Anyone.”
No answer. Just a susurration of dust and weeds in the wind. No night birds sang. No insects chirped. She was blind and alone. Terror came then on dark wings, engulfing her heart. She shoved it away, even though her stomach and bladder quivered. How could she not have heard them leave? She retreated from the door and clicked on an overhead light. The glow spread like a thin puddle. Her brown eyes were wide and crimson-webbed in the rearview mirror; she looked like she was about to scream. Her hijab had fallen offand lay draped over her shoulder. Noor fixed it with trembling fingers.
Maybe she should drive away. Leave them all here. The thought was so powerful she actually took a couple steps toward the driver’s seat before stopping. There was no key in the ignition. Of course, Junaid had it. Movement in the per
iphery of her vision made her turn.
The bus door had slid open. Tabinda stood in the doorway, a silent rotund silhouette with streams of fog snaking between her ankles. Helplessness had left her eyes, leaving a glassy calm behind. “I came back for you,” she said.
Noor wanted to weep for joy. She ran and flung herself at the older woman. Tabinda’s arms tightened around her. “Sorry. The kids were cold and you were sleeping.”
“Where are they now?”
“In a warm place.”
Noor squeezed her one more time and stepped back. “Let’s go. Have you seen Junaid?”
Tabinda shook her head. “No.” Her face was half-paralyzed now. The corner of her mouth sagged. Her left eye was half-lidded.
“Are you all right?”
Tabinda massaged her cheek. “I had a stroke some years back. This happens once in a great while.”
“Were you here in the ruins when you had the stroke?” Noor said. The question came to her familiarly, as if she’d asked this before in a dream.
Tabinda’s lips had cracked from cold. They bled a little when she tried to smile.
“How’d you know?” She held the door open. “Shouldn’t we get going?”
They strode through air dense as snow. Noor couldn’t, for the life of her, understand how Tabinda kept her bearings. Shadows heaved and parted before them. They stepped on twigs, nettles, sharp rocks. The fog sucked its breath in, exhaled and rushed past. When the texture of the ground changed, she knew they were on the city streets. Chips of masonry crunched underfoot; stones, brick shards, gum wrappers, a worker’s implement. At least that’s what she thought it was. Long and pale, it gleamed in the moonlight. Before she could bend to look at it, her companion took her hand and jerked her in the opposite direction. “This way.”
Tabinda scythed the haze with an outstretched arm. They approached a towering structure. The Buddhist stupa. Noor put her hand out and scraped a fingernail across the wall. How cold and brooding and alien it felt with mist clinging to it. She remembered her dream – shiny white phalanges groping the building – and her stomach turned. She pinched her shalwar and rubbed the brick dust off.
“I liked your little history lesson,” Tabinda said. “But it has more meaning than the Israelites gave it.”
“What?”
“It describes existence accurately. The two goats are life and death, both horrendous conditions. Gods are vindictive, after all. Would you like to hear a similar story? It’s from the Mahabharata.”
Noor hesitated. Cautiously she said, “Sure.”
“In the beginning were three cities that orbited the earth. They weren’t happy places.”
In the distance vibration rose, faint as insect static. Noor cocked her head. It was coming from beyond the citadel deep in the night.
“What’s that?”
“The cities fought each other with iron thunderbolts smelted in a hundred thousand suns. Until one invented a unique weapon.”
Tabinda stopped. Before them was a twisted iron door flanked by massive brick colonnades. Rust blanketed it from top to bottom, except for the emblem of the Dancing Girl, hand on her hip, stamped in the middle. Parts of the figure were eroded by age but even through tendrils of fog the dancer’s eyes, now open and swollen with madness, were visible. A brass padlock dangled from a moon-shaped hasp. The door was ajar.
“The weapon was wielded with the force of the universe behind it and it annihilated the rival cities. The cost of preparing it was grave, though. The inhabitants of the triumphant city had to use the blood of entire nations on Earth.”
Tabinda pushed the door and it screeched inward, trailing the vapor pall draped over it. She stepped back, letting Noor peer in. “After you.”
Inside was blackness thick as blood. The noise in the sky was louder now. Whack whack whack! It sounded like a piece of meat stuck in the blades of an electric fan.
“Hold on. What is that?” Noor said uneasily. Her breath steamed and dissolved in the mist.
The professor stood enshrouded in white, her uneven face still as a deep dark pool. “It’s the army chopper come looking for us,” she said. “Don’t worry. They can’t land in this fog.”
Noor tried to back out, but Tabinda was quick. A two-handed fist slammed Noor’s shoulder blade. Agony shot through her spine, buckling her, sending her flying through the doorway. The black rushed at her. She flailed her arms, trying to grab a handhold but tripped and smashed headlong into something solid. The world exploded into fractals: gray and black and grainy. A buzzing in her ears, something circling her brain, enfolding it like a reptile’s maw – and Noor disintegrated.
Someone scraped up her pieces and put her together. She was slithering down steps as cold and unforgiving as faith’s hold. Liquid heat simmered in her eyes. Her knees bumped and banged. One shoe jammed in a crack at the edge of the staircase; someone yanked her foot out and continued dragging her.
She was placed on a hard surface. Mist and incense smoke roiled in a vortex around her. Her eyes watered from the fumes. Through the haze she glimpsed figures revolving slowly. Half a dozen, maybe more. They drummed long spear-like objects on their sneakers and boots. She licked her lips. Her tongue was a festering ulcer, her head a beehive of bewilderment.
Pain squeezed her shoulders when Noor raised her head. She moaned. She was lying on her stomach on a narrow ledge inside the citadel, a long rectangular room with a brick ledge running from end to end three feet above the dry communal pool. The great bathhouse. It took her a minute to realize that her wrists were throbbing. They were bound with rope. So were her ankles.
“For a long time I wondered why the inhabitants of Mohenjo-Daro were so particular about the drainage system,” said Tabinda. She was standing in the middle of the pool before a brick-lined circular opening about six feet wide. Mist wreathed the hole and Noor couldn’t see inside it. Tabinda wore a fan-shaped metallic headdress with its edges dipped to create circular indentations at both ends. Flames flickered in small clay lamps placed inside these hollows. Her face was red with heat and perspiration, the half-paralysis so bad it seemed she was scalded on one side.
“Every house had its own drain connected to a network of brick channels in the streets. The channels ran clever courses and ended here in the bathhouse. I couldn’t understand why they’d want to dump sewage here. It didn’t make sense.”
Tabinda was surrounded by a procession of seven figures: cadets wearing glittering bangles on their arms and circling diya lamps in the dense air. Smoke plumed in rapid spirals, thickening their features, sending sooty entrails across faces shining like glass. Tabrez and Raheem were among them. Tabrez’s freckles glistened.
“It wasn’t until Fossel and I unearthed the intricate network of brick-lined conduits below the citadel that we understood the purpose of this extensive system.”
The seven boys began to gyrate their way across the pool. Their eyes were glassy. The lamps flared and guttered. They disappeared in the murk. Noor’s heart beat so fast she could feel her limbs jerk with every pulsation. Terror had driven the pain away.
“To this day the Indus script remains indecipherable to others, but Fossel said he had translated it. The meanings of the symbols came to him in a dream, he said.” A grotesque half-smile cracked the right side of her face. “Inscriptions he found on some seals describe the residents’ belief in a supreme father. They called this deity the Terrible Emperor of the Night. Said that he ruled the meat-city in the sky with a lightning arm and a thunder fist, and that he had a hungry mouth on earth. Ancients in other cultures knew of this mouth. In their poems they called it the ōs dhwosos.”
She was mad. The woman was mad. Noor’s blood was ice in her vessels. She strained at the ropes binding her limbs, but it was useless; she was tightly trussed. She arched her back and looked at her captors. Abar had materialized beside the professor. In his hand was a long piece of black glass the size of a child’s femur; similar, Noor realized, to what she had glimps
ed in the street. Devil glass. Abar’s blank gaze was riveted on her. He ran a finger across the jagged edge of the weapon and it came away black with blood.
Abar wiped his finger on his school sweater. There was no cut.
“This wasn’t a bathhouse, you see. This was an ablution pool,” Tabinda said gently, as if explaining to a child, “filled with the city’s libation.”
It took Noor a moment to understand what that meant. When she did, her flesh went cold.
“Once a year the omphalos would tauten and the door to His house swing open. At some point in their history, during years of drought and starvation perhaps, the residents turned to their children. Always the oldest offspring lain carefully by the blood gutters. It wasn’t until enemy races conquered Mohenjo-Daro that the practice finally came to an end,” Tabinda said. She rubbed her throat absently. “The following year, however, in one night the entire city along with its new rulers was destroyed.”
The cadets reappeared, dragging a sizable bundle across the dry pool. It left a glistening black trail fading into the mist. A hand dropped from the bundle. Noor began to tremble, her breath hitching.
The fingertips were white, the nails perfectly manicured.
“How could we have known when we began the dig?” said Tabinda. Behind her Abar stood passing the glass knife from one hand to the other. It sparkled in the gloom. “I wanted to flee when the dreams started, but Fossel wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to study the darkness, as he put it. The tablets and seals indicated the secret room was real. And he said he would find it.”
They placed the bundle before the brick-lined drain. Tabinda stooped, rummaged, and heaved out a lolling object, which might have been a human head. The oil lamp nearest her winked out. The bundle twitched and began to move. Tabinda tilted her head to the sky. The incense swirled a wreath around her head.
“After the laborers died, after the attempt on his life, Fossel was so shaken he flew out the next day. I left quickly myself. Spent years convincing myself it was a bout of madness. PTSD or some shit like that, but the nightmares just wouldn’t stop. Every night the same voices and faces. This fucking room with its heaps of glass. Then I read about exposure therapy. Flood yourself with what you fear most. Sounds like a good idea, I thought. Return to the city on the anniversary of the day the horror began. Pop in, pop out, be done, never go back.”